A few days late but, Happy New Year! 2014 is gone and it was an interesting year. Learnt quite a few new things in different areas, created tons of code, and got a couple of very interesting ideas to explore in 2015. It also ended in a great way with a visit to CodeBlue to present BadXNU, a rotten apple. If there’s city and country I always wanted to visit, those were Tokyo and Japan....
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....
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....
Aloha, Shakacon number 6 is over, it was a blast and I must confess it beat my expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved in making it possible. Definitely recommended if you want to speak or attend, and totally worth the massive jet lag. My presentation was about reverse engineering Hacking Team OS X malware latest known sample. The slide count is 206 and I was obviously not able to present everything. The goal is that you have a nice reference available for this malware and also MPRESS unpacking (technically dumping)....