8 ms·

Plug’nPwn – Connect to Jailbreak

Kednicma 6y ago
I like that they explicitly call on Apple to document the method of exploitation. Apple surely has internal documentation explaining how these debug commands work.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_qulr 6y ago
Has anyone noticed that this newer MacBook Pro clearly exhibits "Staingate" anti-reflecting coating peeling off the screen? (You can see it in the video.)
- ebg13 6y ago
  What makes you think it's not just filthy?
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Because I own a MacBook Pro that has developed Staingate twice (the second time after a screen replacement). If you've ever seen it IRL, it's obvious.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      The laptop in the video just looks like how my screen gets when too my fingers have been on it.
      - _qulr 6y ago
        > The laptop in the video just looks like how my screen gets when too my fingers have been on it. When do your fingers ever get on the bottom left corner of the screen, for example? That's classic Staingate and not an area you would touch the screen.
        hombre_fatal 6y ago
        That's something I ask myself every time I'm cleaning my monitor. How is there a fingerprint anywhere on it much less inexplicably in the corners? Also, sometimes the act of cleaning doesn't get off all the grime and pushes a residual layer around which you don't notice until sunlight or when snapping a pic. Never had issues with the coating itself bubbling or coming off. Just saying, the laptop in the video looks potentially inside the realm of grime (where I live and hold scepter).
        _qulr 6y ago
        > That's something I ask myself every time I'm cleaning my monitor. How is there a fingerprint anywhere on it much less inexplicably in the corners? The bottom left corner of a monitor is the first place I touch it in order to adjust its position. The critical difference is that a monitor doesn't have a computer body attached to it perpendicularly at the bottom. The ergonomics are completely different.
        ebg13 6y ago
        > When do your fingers ever get on the bottom left corner of the screen, for example? I just checked. Apparently all the time. Finger oil smears on my laptop screen are completely evenly distributed across the entire area. The screen in the video looks to me exactly like smeared oil and residue that was wiped only perfunctorily
    - bartvk 6y ago
      Nowadays, I buy a screen protector together with a new MacBook. I've never experienced staingate but I did see how dirty keys ate into the coating of the screen.
spacedcowboy 6y ago
I suspect two things: 1) Apple will have a problem with this. They generally don’t care about small-scale things like hackintosh, but this is a bit different. Selling a device to automagically hack a key logger into a modern Mac goes over their ‘line in the sand’, I’d expect. Openly selling it is ... brave, IMHO. 2) I can see some further work on their part to beef up the security over usb-pd. Perhaps the first thing is, as the article suggests, to force external attention from the user (hold down both shift keys...) but ultimately I could see it going to challenge/response and sha256 keys or similar.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Would Apple have a legitimate legal argument for stopping these devices? DMCA violation? They have a real purpose as research tools...
  - jsiepkes 6y ago
    Once you find yourself against a team of lawyers funded by an organisation with basically unlimited money them not having a "legitimate legal argument" becomes less relevant.
    - joshspankit 6y ago
      As we have seen in the past, however: this is mostly only an issue if you reside or operate in the US.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        The US government is not afraid of meddling in/pressuring other countries to get what they want. Case in point: Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom.
      - jsiepkes 6y ago
        It works like this in most places. A good friend of mine went head to head with the Dutch tax service. It was obvious from the start the tax service could never win. So he won...after about 5 years of legal proceedings and having to finance the whole thing up front before getting his money. Remember you have to fight them in your spare time, for them it's just work time.
mschuster91 6y ago
> This is because in Mac portables the keyboard is directly connected to the T2 and passed through to macOS. Oh god please tell me this is a joke... what were they thinking? Seriously?! Bad enough most Windows laptops run the keyboard through the EC, but at least nobody outside secret services attacks them and they are diverse, while everyone and their dog is picking at the T2 chip.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  Did you know that the T2 is also the SSD controller in recent macs? It's basically the southbridge controller for macs.
- detaro 6y ago
  Isn't that intentional so T2 + keyboard + touchbar can work as a secure system with IO to the user?
Gaelan 6y ago
This isn't persistent, right? At least on iPhones, checkra1n needs to run every boot to keep the device jailbroken. So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  “as long as ______ you can trust it” is a very dangerous statement. Persistent (and silent) hacks are kept out of the public’s eye because they get sold for six figures and higher. As soon as one of those becomes public, they are essentially worthless.
  - devenblake 6y ago
    If you're being chased after the type of people who can buy hacks for six figures or higher you're as good as dead anyway.
  - Gaelan 6y ago
    Fair enough. I guess what I meant to say is "as long as you saw it boot up with nothing in the USB ports, you don't have to worry about this particular vulnerability."
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it. That's assuming they haven't just attached it to the port from the inside. Or, for that matter, replaced the entire logic board with their own, having used some less subtle attack against the original to extract and copy its secrets/data. You can't really trust anything an attacker has had unsupervised physical access to.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jpillora 6y ago
  Demo shows root shell. So an attacker could simply install a RAT into /Library/LaunchDaemons and it's permanent.
fulafel 6y ago
Interesting that Apple has been so successful in keeping technical docs out of leaks. (Or does anyone know of cases?)
- dylan604 6y ago
  An Apple leaker would be punished much more severely than Snowden.
  - devenblake 6y ago
    Snowden exposed governmental crimes. An Apple leaker (while I support their endeavor) wouldn't be exposing anything but company secrets; the ends wouldn't legally justify the means.
- hn_20591249 6y ago
  It is also due to the fact that the T2 and cryptography team is very insular at Apple, if those documents were to be leaked then there are only a few teams where the leak could have originated and the hammer of god would be brought down.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tux1968 6y ago
  Louis Rossmann in his videos has complained about there being no authorized way to obtain technical repair documents. But he has also said that he is lucky enough to have people (some of whom apparently work or worked at Apple) that have given him troves of such documents. I couldn't find the video where he said that again, but I did find one earlier discussion on here about it[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16832323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16832323
irjustin 6y ago
I'm impressed with the engineering effort jailbreakers put into doing this. And, Apple's USB-C thunderbolt port... it's the T1000 of ports.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Well, Thunderbolt is basically PCIe x4 in a nice little cable. And PCIe has very wide access to the system.
zydeco 6y ago
Pre-T2 macs had eficheck to verify the EFI's integrity, but with the T2 being so secure, it's not necessary anymore: https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5020911870672896 https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5020911870672896
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  How are these hackers modifying the EFI section without any kind of digital signature? It's really wide open for writing on all new Macs?
  - zydeco 6y ago
    The EFI firmware is validated by the T2, which then passes it on to the x86 CPU. I assume this modification would not persist after the T2 reboots.
    - aunali1 6y ago
      Unfortunately, this is not the complete picture. The T2 simply programs the embedded flash within the PCH over an eSPI interface. Meaning, a successful reprogram from the T2 WILL persist until the following occurs: - A T2 Restore - A macOS System Update
      - penwellr 6y ago
        rickmark here: Sorry no, that's inaccurate. The T2 provides MacEFI.im4 to the Intel processor by emulating a flash controller over eSPI. So by modifying this file, and removing signature checks you can run any payload you like (see the EFI replacement video)
        MuffinFlavored 6y ago
        So there is some kind of signature defeat involved, correct?
mmastrac 6y ago
I'm still waiting for a jailbreak dongle for iOS that would easily allow booting in a jailbroken state. I know bootm8 was working on a full case but that seems to have died. A similar, persistent project for macs would be awesome.
- penwellr 6y ago
  Apple has similar "magic DFU commands" for lightning, so for the iPhone X and prior this can be done via a magic cable as well... (look into the Bonobo cable)
mjg59 6y ago
(Comment copied over from another thread on this) We generally assume that an attacker with physical access is going to win, but there are limits on that - the usual assumption is that it's going to take some time, and potentially leave evidence that can be picked up with enough attention to detail (such as screws not being in precisely the same alignment). This attack violates all of that - there's no physical modification of the machine, and it takes under a minute. That's the difference between an attack where you know the machine has left your control for some time and an attack that can take place while you're momentarily distracted. The lack of response to this from Apple is deeply disappointing. The attack isn't technically persistent - rebooting the T2 will clear it. But the T2 doesn't reboot when the host OS does, and Apple haven't published any guidance on how to guarantee that it has been (eg, does holding the power button down for long enough cut power to the T2? Does performing an SMC reset? Both seem to, but is that guaranteed to be the case if the T2 is running malicious code?). In addition, the Blackbird SEP exploit probably means that we have to assume that all secrets kept in the Secure Enclave can be stolen - but we don't have a full enumeration of what those typically are, or what the total security impact of this is as a result.

I like that they explicitly call on Apple to document the method of exploitation. Apple surely has internal documentation explaining how these debug commands work.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

_qulr 6y ago

Has anyone noticed that this newer MacBook Pro clearly exhibits "Staingate" anti-reflecting coating peeling off the screen? (You can see it in the video.)

ebg13 6y ago
What makes you think it's not just filthy?
- _qulr 6y ago
  Because I own a MacBook Pro that has developed Staingate twice (the second time after a screen replacement). If you've ever seen it IRL, it's obvious.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The laptop in the video just looks like how my screen gets when too my fingers have been on it.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      > The laptop in the video just looks like how my screen gets when too my fingers have been on it. When do your fingers ever get on the bottom left corner of the screen, for example? That's classic Staingate and not an area you would touch the screen.
      - hombre_fatal 6y ago
        That's something I ask myself every time I'm cleaning my monitor. How is there a fingerprint anywhere on it much less inexplicably in the corners? Also, sometimes the act of cleaning doesn't get off all the grime and pushes a residual layer around which you don't notice until sunlight or when snapping a pic. Never had issues with the coating itself bubbling or coming off. Just saying, the laptop in the video looks potentially inside the realm of grime (where I live and hold scepter).
        _qulr 6y ago
        > That's something I ask myself every time I'm cleaning my monitor. How is there a fingerprint anywhere on it much less inexplicably in the corners? The bottom left corner of a monitor is the first place I touch it in order to adjust its position. The critical difference is that a monitor doesn't have a computer body attached to it perpendicularly at the bottom. The ergonomics are completely different.
      - ebg13 6y ago
        > When do your fingers ever get on the bottom left corner of the screen, for example? I just checked. Apparently all the time. Finger oil smears on my laptop screen are completely evenly distributed across the entire area. The screen in the video looks to me exactly like smeared oil and residue that was wiped only perfunctorily
  - bartvk 6y ago
    Nowadays, I buy a screen protector together with a new MacBook. I've never experienced staingate but I did see how dirty keys ate into the coating of the screen.

spacedcowboy 6y ago

I suspect two things: 1) Apple will have a problem with this. They generally don’t care about small-scale things like hackintosh, but this is a bit different. Selling a device to automagically hack a key logger into a modern Mac goes over their ‘line in the sand’, I’d expect. Openly selling it is ... brave, IMHO. 2) I can see some further work on their part to beef up the security over usb-pd. Perhaps the first thing is, as the article suggests, to force external attention from the user (hold down both shift keys...) but ultimately I could see it going to challenge/response and sha256 keys or similar.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Would Apple have a legitimate legal argument for stopping these devices? DMCA violation? They have a real purpose as research tools...
- jsiepkes 6y ago
  Once you find yourself against a team of lawyers funded by an organisation with basically unlimited money them not having a "legitimate legal argument" becomes less relevant.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    As we have seen in the past, however: this is mostly only an issue if you reside or operate in the US.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      The US government is not afraid of meddling in/pressuring other countries to get what they want. Case in point: Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom.
    - jsiepkes 6y ago
      It works like this in most places. A good friend of mine went head to head with the Dutch tax service. It was obvious from the start the tax service could never win. So he won...after about 5 years of legal proceedings and having to finance the whole thing up front before getting his money. Remember you have to fight them in your spare time, for them it's just work time.

mschuster91 6y ago

> This is because in Mac portables the keyboard is directly connected to the T2 and passed through to macOS. Oh god please tell me this is a joke... what were they thinking? Seriously?! Bad enough most Windows laptops run the keyboard through the EC, but at least nobody outside secret services attacks them and they are diverse, while everyone and their dog is picking at the T2 chip.

barkingcat 6y ago
Did you know that the T2 is also the SSD controller in recent macs? It's basically the southbridge controller for macs.
detaro 6y ago
Isn't that intentional so T2 + keyboard + touchbar can work as a secure system with IO to the user?

Gaelan 6y ago

This isn't persistent, right? At least on iPhones, checkra1n needs to run every boot to keep the device jailbroken. So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it.

joshspankit 6y ago
“as long as ______ you can trust it” is a very dangerous statement. Persistent (and silent) hacks are kept out of the public’s eye because they get sold for six figures and higher. As soon as one of those becomes public, they are essentially worthless.
- devenblake 6y ago
  If you're being chased after the type of people who can buy hacks for six figures or higher you're as good as dead anyway.
- Gaelan 6y ago
  Fair enough. I guess what I meant to say is "as long as you saw it boot up with nothing in the USB ports, you don't have to worry about this particular vulnerability."
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it. That's assuming they haven't just attached it to the port from the inside. Or, for that matter, replaced the entire logic board with their own, having used some less subtle attack against the original to extract and copy its secrets/data. You can't really trust anything an attacker has had unsupervised physical access to.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jpillora 6y ago
Demo shows root shell. So an attacker could simply install a RAT into /Library/LaunchDaemons and it's permanent.

fulafel 6y ago

Interesting that Apple has been so successful in keeping technical docs out of leaks. (Or does anyone know of cases?)

dylan604 6y ago
An Apple leaker would be punished much more severely than Snowden.
- devenblake 6y ago
  Snowden exposed governmental crimes. An Apple leaker (while I support their endeavor) wouldn't be exposing anything but company secrets; the ends wouldn't legally justify the means.
hn_20591249 6y ago
It is also due to the fact that the T2 and cryptography team is very insular at Apple, if those documents were to be leaked then there are only a few teams where the leak could have originated and the hammer of god would be brought down.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tux1968 6y ago
Louis Rossmann in his videos has complained about there being no authorized way to obtain technical repair documents. But he has also said that he is lucky enough to have people (some of whom apparently work or worked at Apple) that have given him troves of such documents. I couldn't find the video where he said that again, but I did find one earlier discussion on here about it[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16832323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16832323

irjustin 6y ago

I'm impressed with the engineering effort jailbreakers put into doing this. And, Apple's USB-C thunderbolt port... it's the T1000 of ports.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Well, Thunderbolt is basically PCIe x4 in a nice little cable. And PCIe has very wide access to the system.

zydeco 6y ago

Pre-T2 macs had eficheck to verify the EFI's integrity, but with the T2 being so secure, it's not necessary anymore: https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5020911870672896 https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5020911870672896

MuffinFlavored 6y ago
How are these hackers modifying the EFI section without any kind of digital signature? It's really wide open for writing on all new Macs?
- zydeco 6y ago
  The EFI firmware is validated by the T2, which then passes it on to the x86 CPU. I assume this modification would not persist after the T2 reboots.
  - aunali1 6y ago
    Unfortunately, this is not the complete picture. The T2 simply programs the embedded flash within the PCH over an eSPI interface. Meaning, a successful reprogram from the T2 WILL persist until the following occurs: - A T2 Restore - A macOS System Update
    - penwellr 6y ago
      rickmark here: Sorry no, that's inaccurate. The T2 provides MacEFI.im4 to the Intel processor by emulating a flash controller over eSPI. So by modifying this file, and removing signature checks you can run any payload you like (see the EFI replacement video)
      - MuffinFlavored 6y ago
        So there is some kind of signature defeat involved, correct?

mmastrac 6y ago

I'm still waiting for a jailbreak dongle for iOS that would easily allow booting in a jailbroken state. I know bootm8 was working on a full case but that seems to have died. A similar, persistent project for macs would be awesome.

penwellr 6y ago
Apple has similar "magic DFU commands" for lightning, so for the iPhone X and prior this can be done via a magic cable as well... (look into the Bonobo cable)

mjg59 6y ago

(Comment copied over from another thread on this) We generally assume that an attacker with physical access is going to win, but there are limits on that - the usual assumption is that it's going to take some time, and potentially leave evidence that can be picked up with enough attention to detail (such as screws not being in precisely the same alignment). This attack violates all of that - there's no physical modification of the machine, and it takes under a minute. That's the difference between an attack where you know the machine has left your control for some time and an attack that can take place while you're momentarily distracted. The lack of response to this from Apple is deeply disappointing. The attack isn't technically persistent - rebooting the T2 will clear it. But the T2 doesn't reboot when the host OS does, and Apple haven't published any guidance on how to guarantee that it has been (eg, does holding the power button down for long enough cut power to the T2? Does performing an SMC reset? Both seem to, but is that guaranteed to be the case if the T2 is running malicious code?). In addition, the Blackbird SEP exploit probably means that we have to assume that all secrets kept in the Secure Enclave can be stolen - but we don't have a full enumeration of what those typically are, or what the total security impact of this is as a result.