Gatekeeper is Already Present in OS X Lion But is Disabled By Default

Gatekeeper, a new security feature Apple is touting for OS X Mountain Lion, is already present in OS X Lion but is hidden and disabled by default, reports MacRumors.

Mac OS X users will soon have the option of turning on Gatekeeper, a new Mac OS X security feature. 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).


Developers can enable Gatekeeper on OS X Lion 10.7.3 by running sudo spctl --enable in Terminal.

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