Apple's Gatekeeper Still Broken (csoonline.com)

itwbennett writes: This weekend, Apple security expert Patrick Wardle will detail a vulnerability in Apple's Gatekeeper that makes it possible to bypass the anti-malware defense. This is the same vulnerability that was disclosed last April, which Apple said it patched later. Wardle was able to easily bypass Apple's fixes. He says "all Apple did was blacklist the signed apps he was abusing, but didn't fix the underlying issue, which is that, essentially, Gatekeeper functions as a guard that doesn't check" software already on the whitelist.

Comments

Working As Intended

[BitZtream]

Its working exactly as its supposed to. Its not meant to stop everything, its just a whitelisting system with some authentication built it.

Blacklisting the offending apps is exactly how this type of system works.

Anything signed by a valid cert which has been signed by Apple's cert is trusted by default. Thats what having an Apple signature on top of the publisher signature means. This also means the applications are 'tamper proof' in theory, because changing the application invalidates the sig and the code no longer is whitelisted, so no virus will work.

The system then keeps a CRL, Certificate Revocation List. This list is ... blacklisted fingerprints. That is, certs or specific apps that were not known to be compromised or malicious when Apple originally vetted them, but something became known to be compromised after that process. The CRL list means Apple can effectively change its mind about apps that it previously approved.

This is all it is intended to do, and that alone mitigates a metric fuckton of exploit cases.

Doesn't prevent apps that don't get caught in review. But you won't get more than one or two malicious apps past them before you're completely cut off from getting certs ever again. Vendors outside the AppStore will have their certs revoked when exposed in the wild.

At no point was it intended to prevent every single exploit vector ever. You're pretty ignorant of how this stuff works if you think they ever said it was the cure all to security issues.

All it does is adds a layer of control to who can run arbitrary code on your system, and by default, allows Apple to give people permission to do so. You can also use your own certs and remove the AppStore cert, effectively making it so only apps signed with your cert will run on the machine ... or in the case of some companies, the company's cert is the only thing that runs on the machine.

itwbennet == bennet haselton / dumb