Security

Let me present you another TrustedBSD policy module, this time to control execution of suid enabled binaries. The idea to create this started with nemo’s exploitation of bash’s shellshock bug and VMware Fusion. It was an easy local privilege escalation because there are many Fusion suid enabled binaries. This got me thinking that I want to know when this kind of binaries are executed and if possible control access to them....

The iOS 8 security update bulletin has many fixed bugs, one of which is this one: A double free issue existed in the handling of Mach ports. This issue was addressed through improved validation of Mach ports. CVE-2014-4375 : an anonymous researcher. Well, I’ve known this bug for a while and it was insanely fun as anti-debugging measure because of its random effects when triggered. For example, sometimes you get an immediate kernel panic, others nothing happens, and most of the time you get weird CPU spikes not attributed to any process, or system lock ups after a while....

At BlackHat Asia 2014, Ming-chieh Pan and Sung-ting Tsai presented about Mac OS X Rootkits (paper and slides). They describe some very cool techniques to access kernel memory in different ways than the usual ones. The slides and paper aren’t very descriptive about all the techniques so this weekend I decided to give it a try and replicate the described vulnerability to access kernel memory. The access to kernel task (process 0) was possible before Leopard (or was it fixed in Snow Leopard?...

After surviving the five shots at SyScan’s WhiskeyCon I am finally back home and you get a chance to see the slides and code for the TrustedBSD module I presented there. The goal of REX vs The Romans is to work as detection and prevention tool of Hacking Team’s OS X malware. The TrustedBSD hook allows to detect if the system is already infected, and the Kauth listener to warn about any future infection....

Rex the Wonder Dog (here and here) is a proof of concept that uses TrustedBSD framework to install kernel level backdoors. Volatility is able to detect these malicious modules with a plugin created by Andrew Case. The plugin works by looking up the TrustedBSD structures and dumping information about the loaded modules. At SyScan360 I presented a “new” trick to bypass this plugin by creating a shadow structure and leaving the legit one untouched....