14 DAY TRIAL // It has been revealed that prior to announcing Mountain Lion, Apple invited several high-profile developers to test a function that the company is marketing in the new OS, but is also present in the current version of the operating system - Lion.
Apple is informing developers that Gatekeeper, a security feature baked inside the next major OS X release, is already embedded in OS X 10.7.3, the current version of Apple’s Lion operating system available to the public.
The Cupertino giant is encouraging code savvy users to enable the feature from the command line and test it out.
“Mac OS X users will soon have the option of turning on Gatekeeper, a new Mac OS X security feature,” reads Apple’s memo.
“When a user does this, the system provides an additional measure of safety: it blocks that user from opening newly-downloaded applications that are not Developer ID–signed. In this scenario, the same user is easily able to launch downloaded applications that are Developer ID–signed.”
“By default, Gatekeeper is not enabled in Mac OS X v10.7.3. For testing purposes, you can turn it on by using the new Mac OS X system policy control command-line tool, spctl(8),” the company says.
To switch Gatekeeper on, devs must run the command "sudo spctl --enable" in Terminal.
Gatekeeper is implemented in OS X Mountain Lion to help prevent users from unknowingly downloading and installing malware.
Not only that, Gatekeeper has a built-in assistant module that allows users to control which applications can be downloaded and run on their Mac.
Apple outlines the three security options as follows:
“You can download and run applications from anywhere, just as in OS X Lion. To be even safer, download and run apps from the Mac App Store and apps with a Developer ID. Or download and run only apps from the Mac App Store — the safest setting of all. Gatekeeper lets you decide which setting is best for you. Learn more about Gatekeeper.”
Update: included instructions on how to enable Gatekeeper.