As little as three years ago, the concept of remote kernelexploitation remained arcane for most people in the security industryand was believed in some circles to be practically impossible, mostlydue to reliability issues. However, things in the security realm changequickly. Reliable exploit techniques come and go, new securitymechanisms are introduced, and arcane exploitation concepts arerevisited. Sometimes an exploitation concept that was once brushed offas too unreliable is reconsidered, bringing it again into focus as auseful and feasible attack vector.
Kernel vulnerabilities themselves are nothing new, of course. Theexploitation of local kernel flaws has been a popular pastime for manyresearchers and hackers over the years, and in many cases these flawswere shown to be exploited just as reliably as a local flaw in userlandsoftware. However, being local to the system has its advantages; thelevel of interactivity with the system and the data that is availablemake for...
The month of January is already over and, accordingly, so is the Month of Apple Bugs(MoAB). As promised, one advisory was released every day of the month,in some cases addressing numerous vulnerabilities in an application.Unlike the Month of Browser Bugs and Month of Kernel Bugs, this time we saw the interesting twist of a parallel group starting a Month of Apple Fixes.This group was responsible for the release of unofficial run-timepatches for the majority of the issues disclosed, with the exception ofthose affecting the kernel.
The classes of vulnerabilities discovered during the MoAB coveredpretty much the whole gamut, including stack and...
Succinct information regarding the OS Xthreat landscape is hard to come by. Much of the information regardingOS X security and threats is blatantly wrong, overwhelmed by flamewars, and generally hard to digest. This isn’t to say that researchersaren’t releasing accurate and cutting edge information regardingviruses, vulnerabilities, and exploitation vectors affecting theplatform. On the contrary, it seems that many of the defenders or usersof OS X are unaware of their existence, don't understand them, orsimply choose to ignore them.
In light of all of the misinformation and confusion surrounding thetopic, there is a lack of a sufficient summary of what threats haveaffected OS X and what research is being carried out regarding theplatform. So, I decided to document it. The document I set out to writewas not meant to uncover anything new. No new vulnerabilities, exploitvectors, or rootkit techniques. Instead, I wanted to correlate andsummarize the...
