ID: IRCNE2012021400
Date: 2012-02-12
According to "cnet", Apple offers a number of options for securing your data on a Mac, including enabling FileVault for whole disk encryption in Lion, and encrypted disk images for securing collections of documents.
In addition, as with other software developers, Apple has included options to secure individual documents for some of its programs, such as those in its iWork productivity suite.
To do this in iWork, create or open a document in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, and then open the inspector window by clicking its icon in the toolbar or by pressing Option-Command-I. Then select the "Document" section in the inspector and check the option to require a password to view the document. After supplying a your password and confirming it, the document will now require you supply this password whenever it is opened.
While Apple uses 128-bit AES encryption in its password-protected documents, unless you use a good password, then it is quite feasible that the password can be cracked.
Recently to help forensic agencies, password decryption company Passware described its ability to recover Apple's FileVault 2 encryption keys from system memory using FireWire's Direct Memory Access (DMA) features.
ElcomSoft's tool is not only designed to work against iWork documents, but also is used to guess the passwords for Office documents, Windows and Unix log-ons, PDF documents, and numerous other technologies.
To help avoid this, it is best to ensure the passwords you use are high-quality, and are not patterned in ways that might be easy to guess. If you need help in choosing a good password to use for a document or system service, Apple does offer a password assistant as part of its security framework that can be invoked through programs built with this framework.
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