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Oh my I feel so sorry for apple security engineer's right now. I'm curious the motivations to release such a serious, and complex, 0day on new years eve!? Makes
by stevemk14ebr 9y ago
Oh my I feel so sorry for apple security engineer's right now. I'm curious the motivations to release such a serious, and complex, 0day on new years eve!? Makes me wonder who brushed this guy the wrong way, or if he just wants to watch the world burn.
That said, seriously impressive work and I give him props.
- x0x0 9y ago> Siguza, 01. Dec 2017 (published 31. Dec 2017) If I had to guess, he waited a month, got blown off, and said, "Fuck it." Also -- I feel like the underlying bug, ie relying on values in a volatile variable that is shared -- are the sort of thing that source code could be systematically tested for, both mechanically and by humans. But my strong impression is that Apple doesn't care about MacOS and definitely doesn't put the A team on it. Or even the B team.
- Siguza 9y agoI had actually submitted to the ZDI, but had written the exploit & write-up in the first place mainly because I like hacking rather than for money. I figured I'd see what offers I'd get anyway, but once I had spent all the time on the write-up, I mainly wanted people to see that, and the amount offered wasn't enough to convince me otherwise. I might've published this earlier even, but my December was kinda busy, first with the v0rtex exploit and then with 34C3. And an engineer from Apple's security team contacted me a bit after releasing - they had found the bug a while ago, but hadn't verified the subsequent patch which actually didn't fix it. And a while ago I tweeted this https://twitter.com/s1guza/status/921889566549831680 https://twitter.com/s1guza/status/921889566549831680 (try diff'ing sources to find it :P). So they do have people on it. I also told that person to extend my condolences to whoever has to come in and fix that now, but they basically said that there's nothing to apologise for and that they (the team) really like such write-ups. So... I guess I'm not that evil? And I neither wanna watch the world burn nor did anyone brush me the wrong way - I didn't publish this out of hate, but out of love for hacking. If you're concerned about skids hacking you now, they need to get code execution first on your machine. If you're concerned about people who can do that, then those can also get kernel r/w without me, so... nothing really changed for the average user. PS: Yes, it's really me. Will add keybase proof if my karma gets >= 2. Edit: done, see my profile.
- tischler 9y agoIncredible work. How did you find the bug and how many hours did it take you in total?
- Siguza 9y agoI found it by looking through IOHIDFamily's source, hoping to find a low-hanging fruit affecting iOS. In total? A lot, probably way too much... I had found it in February and started to write an exploit in April. Next to my studies, exams, the Phœnix Jailbreak and Apple trying to mitigate tfp0, it took me until August to get a fully working exploit, at which point I figured I'd wait for High Sierra. And that actually broke a bunch of stuff (heap layout assumptions, ROP gadgets, kernel symbols, ...) so I had to fix these. In October I started working on the write-up, but when I got to the part about the info leak, I had written that it's most likely possible, but I had no demo for that. I didn't wanna leave an empty claim stand there like that, so I ended up taking another month to get the "leak" binary working and basically write a second exploit. By that time it was early November - the write-up with its graphs took some time and before I knew it, December had started (at which point I was finally done). All in all probably 200-250h - but it was a hard-to-exploit bug (IMO), I've done way more than necessary, and when I started I had still rather little knowledge of XNU and required a lot of time to learn how most stuff worked. Especially everything from the "leak" part was later really useful for v0rtex, whose initial version took me just one and a half days then - without that work, it would've taken me a couple of weeks at least.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoIf Apple doesn't offer you a job they're insane.
- atmosx 9y agoThat was my thought too. As an apple customer (5+ macs and 10+ i-Devices), I'd feel way better knowing that apple cares about macOS security enough to hire skilled engineers.
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- Godel_unicode 9y ago> I'm curious the motivations to release such a serious, and complex, 0day on new years eve!? CVE 2018-0001, it's all about namespaces.
- floatingatoll 9y agoBonus points if they issue it as CVE-2018-65536 (pen-test the world, so to speak) EDIT: "No one would ever store the CVE incrementing fragment as a 16-bit unsigned int!"
- tlrobinson 9y agoCVE 2018-0002: Flaw in CVE numbering procedure incentivizes dropping zero days on New Year’s Eve.
- stevekemp 9y agoI remember waiting to report a security issue with some trivial setuid application until January, back a few years, specifically so I could claim the first CVE of the year. I was unlucky and it didn't work out, but come December time I do wonder if I should dedicate more time to audits ..
- codezero 9y agoLooks like that number was already reserved for a still unpublished vuln. We’re already up to > 3000 in 2018!
- tbrock 9y agoMacOS 10.13.2 (which fixes this) has already been out for almost a month so likely nobody will care. Patch your shit people.
- Siguza 9y agoNah, it doesn't fix the actual vuln - it's just that my exploit doesn't work out of the box because the "hid" binary uses a hardware info leak which doesn't work anymore the way I was doing it. If you patched the "leak" and "hid" binaries together, you'd still get kernel r/w on 10.13.2.
- tbrock 9y agoAh dang, you are right, wow.