[plug] Help needed - hackers/crackers and monolithic kernels

[Richard Meyer]

A friend from more civilised climes (you can see that from the fact he
gets magazines a month before their publication dates - ;-) sent me the
following extract. As you may have guessed - he's a Mac fan.

> The 2600 Hacker Society was featured in the September 2005 issue of 
> MacAddict, and they had a lot to say.
> 
> Some credited OS X's superior technology. "The NSA lists Mac OS X
> among 
> the most secure operating systems because it uses an open-source 
> monolithic kernel structure," according to hacker Patrick Roanhouse. 
> "It takes all the necessary modules and drivers and incorporates them 
> into the kernel to form on large kernel. You can't exploit 
> communication between external modules and the kernel to form one
> large 
> kernel. You can't exploit communication between external modules and 
> the kernel like you can in Windows and Linux."

Now, AFAIK, the Mac (OSX) kernel is a derivative of the Mach kernel,
which is a micro-kernel - therefore Patrick Whossname is talking crap
about monolithic, and I have never heard that microkernels are LESS
secure than monolithic kernels.

Anybody got any (printable) rebuttals - yes, I'm looking at you, Craig
Ringer, and anybody else with Mac experience? I've never heard the
monolithic kernel story before - it's always been buffer overflows and
such fun. Anybody?
-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>