Security

If you are a rootkits fan the latest Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in 2014 brought us two excellent presentations, Thunderstrike by Trammell Hudson and Attacks on UEFI security, inspired by Darth Venami’s misery and Speed Racer by Rafal Wojtczuk and Corey Kallenberg. The first one was related to the possibility to attack EFI from a Thunderbolt device, and the second had a very interesting vulnerability regarding the (U)EFI boot script table....

The rootpipe vulnerability was finally fully disclosed last week after a couple of months of expectation since its first announcement. It was disclosed as a hidden backdoor but it’s really something more related to access control and crap design than a backdoor. Although keep in mind that good backdoors should be hard to distinguish from simple errors. In this case there are a lot of services using this feature so it’s hardly a hidden backdoor that just sits there waiting for some evil purpose....

Santa is a binary whitelisting/blacklisting system made by Google Macintosh Operations Team. While I refer to it as Google’s Santa it is not an official Google product. It is based on a kernel extension and userland components to control the execution of binaries in OS X systems. It features two interesting modes of execution, monitor and lockdown. The monitor mode is a blacklisting system, where all binaries except those blacklisted can run....

The last SyScan is almost here so it’s time to get again into a plane and travel to Singapore. This means that the slides and source code can finally be released. Below you can find the archive with both presentations slides (they are slightly different, SyScan version fixes/upgrades a few things) and full source code for both rootkit/kext loaders. I hope you enjoy them; they are quite fun techniques, in particular the second one which now I sort of regret to disclose because it’s so cool....

Today a local privilege escalation vulnerability was disclosed in this blog post. It describes a vulnerability in IOBluetoothFamily kernel extension (IOKit is a never-ending hole of security vulnerabilities). Mavericks and most probably all previous versions are vulnerable but not Yosemite. The reason for this is that Apple silently patched the bug in Yosemite. This is not a new practice, where Apple patches bugs in the latest and newly released OS X version and doesn’t care about older versions....