From a general social standard one will ask oneself on daily interaction with an individual “can I trust this person?” Mac users and administrators for years had little to worry about in terms of the level of trust that is place in the user and his or her daily interaction with public networks or files. This has changed in the last 10 years. From the administrator's standpoint this is a high-end Unix system that is being tasked more and more with providing a wide range of services. When implementing a secure Macintosh framework, a major goal is to provide a system for measuring the evidence to have confidence in the truth of the person or thing.
Due to the fact that we are humans, we are unable to identify a quantitative measure of confidence; we need to evaluate the evidence presented to a security structure. This allows the administrator to achieve a measure of assurance that the person cannot abuse this degree of trust. So, we need to develop a way to trust users, administrators and the files interacting within the secure Mac framework.
Ok, I know what you are thinking, these are Macs, security is taken care of and as a business we do not need to do the stuffy work of the rest of the IT world. Again, this is a warning, you are not just a Mac administrator you are an UNIX administrator. Think about how much better the Mac platform is since OSX. Why wouldn’t we not just want but also need to take the professionalism of the experience of Unix security gurus and make the Mac platform more secure? Security engineering methods make perfect sense and allow for continuous improvement and measurement by the organization. So as part of my final project for my masters in CS from BU, I plan to post my working framework for a secure Macintosh environment.