Mac OS X Lion’s auto-login has a security flaw

If you have recently installed Mac OS X Lion on your computer, you might have been slightly pleased with the automatic login which shaves off a couple of seconds between turning on your computer and getting down to business. As convenient as that feature may be, it turns out that the feature could very well leave your passwords ripe for the picking.

According to a leading password recovery software developer Passware, your password could be easily accessed via the direct memory access associated with the Mac’s FireWire port.

It seems that by enabling the “automatic login” feature the FireWire port on your Mac opens the door to unauthorized password recovery. It seems that this is an issue that has plagued Snow Leopard as well, but as it stands it does not look like there is any fix for it, apart from disabling “automatic login” and spending that extra second or two typing in your password.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: login, os x lion, password