Noted security researcher Kristin Paget—known for her work that helped to beef up the security of Windows Vista—is now working at Apple as a Core OS Security Researcher. Paget confirmed to Wired that she has been working at Apple since September but couldn't divulge any specific details of her work.
Paget has a long history of finding and plugging security holes in all manner of hardware and software. Perhaps most famously, she was part of a group of hackers hired by Microsoft to "lock down" the upcoming Windows Vista operating system in 2006. Microsoft had apparently expected Vista to be fairly secure at that point in its development cycle, but Paget and her cohorts found so many holes that Microsoft ended up delaying its release.
"We prevented a lot of bugs from shipping on Vista," Paget said during a talk at Black Hat last year, after the NDA she signed with Microsoft had expired. "I'm proud of the number of bugs we found and helped get fixed."
In 2009, Paget (then named Chris) unveiled a custom-built mobile platform that captured the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next-generation drivers licenses. During a 20-minute demonstration with Dan Goodin (before he became IT Security Editor at Ars), Paget's $250 proof-of-concept device was able to surreptitiously copy RFID tags of two passport cards as she drove through downtown San Francisco. The identifiers could then be cloned and loaded onto separate cards.
Paget also has experience intercepting cell phone calls using flaws in the GSM protocol, and has described herself as a "total UNIX head." Those are qualities we expect should be beneficial if put toward locking down OS X and iOS, both built on the same UNIX-based core.
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