I have started to have a look at my local installed helpers on macOS. These
helpers are used as an interface for applications to perform privileged
operations on the system. Thus, it is quite a nice attack surface to search for
Local Privilege Escalations.
Forklift is an advanced dual pane file manager for macOS. It is well known under
macOS power users.
As part of my investigation I identified vulnerabilities in Forklift allowing
local privilege escalation.
Due to the new release of macOS Mojave in September we updated the El Capitan
hardening guide.
The hardening guide received a little revamp on some chapters which are now
obsolete or had to be changed due to the new features of macOS Mojave. Further,
the hardening guide got extended for the new privacy features in macOS Mojave.
You can check it out
here.
We hope some of you might find it helpful.
Cheers,
Birk
Similar to the documents we
released for Linux
and
Windows (and
actually inspired by a comment to the post on the Linux
guide) Antonios wrote another guide, this
time for Mac OS X.
It can
be found here.
We hope some of you might find it helpful.
Have a great day
In the course of a recent endpoint assessment, we also had a OS X 10.8 client
system as a target. While we still rely on the Firewire “capability” of
unlocking systems on a regular base (using
this great tool), we noticed
that Apple released a patch to disable
Firewire DMA access whenever the system is in a locked state (e.g. with an
active screensaver or no user logged in). As we test the Firewire DMA access
vulnerability quite often (at least we thought so 😉 ) to prepare for
demonstrations in the board room or client assessments, we were quite surprised
that we must have actually missed that nice update. In order to verify the
effectiveness of the patch, we ran our typical test bed and can quite happily
confirm that the update successfully mitigates Firewire DMA access in locked
system states.