[MacTUG] Preventing unauthorized OSX "Recovery"

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

To elaborate on Dani's comments.

This is not some great site that I have bookmarked or anything, but this page explains it reasonably well

http://www.chriswrites.com/2012/02/how-to-set-the-firmware-password-in-mac-os-x/

There are some ways to do it without booting from the recover partition (or a system dvd) but I would likely do it the official way the first time at least.

In the older macs, the firmware password was not perfect in the security in that any simple change in the mac's hardware (like pulling out some of the RAM) was enough to turn off the firmware. I think the reasoning was that if you could 'break in' to the mac enough to change the hardware, then clearly you were an admin type and you should be able to turn off the firmware password. This line of reasoning was quasi-acceptable if all you had were Mac Towers, which could be locked to prohibit access, but there were a lot of macs such as a lot of iMacs and Mac Minis where it was really easy to change the ram configuration.