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Researcher Reveals a Severe, Unpatched Mac Password Flaw To Protest Apple Bug Bounty (venturebeat.com)
Linuz Henze, a credible researcher, has revealed an exploit that in a single button press can reveal the passwords in a Mac's keychain. From a report: Keychain is where macOS stores most of the passwords used on the machine, ranging from iMessage private encryption keys to certificates, secured notes, Wi-Fi, and other Apple hardware passwords, app passwords, and web passwords. A pre-installed app called Keychain Access enables users to view the entire list of stored items, unlocking each one individually by repeatedly entering the system password, but Henze's KeySteal exploit grabs everything with a single press of a "Show me your secrets" button.
While the demo is run on a 2014 MacBook Pro without Apple's latest security chips, Henze says that it works "without root or administrator privileges and without password prompts, of course." It appears to work on the Mac's login and system keychains, but not iCloud's keychain. Generally, white hat security researchers publicly reveal flaws like this only after informing the company and giving it ample time to fix the issues. But Henze is refusing to assist Apple because it doesn't offer paid bug bounties for macOS.
While the demo is run on a 2014 MacBook Pro without Apple's latest security chips, Henze says that it works "without root or administrator privileges and without password prompts, of course." It appears to work on the Mac's login and system keychains, but not iCloud's keychain. Generally, white hat security researchers publicly reveal flaws like this only after informing the company and giving it ample time to fix the issues. But Henze is refusing to assist Apple because it doesn't offer paid bug bounties for macOS.
It just works.. If someone wants to know your password.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It's NOT a requirement that companies offer bug bounties, just as it's not a requirement that people who find these exploits are required to report them to the company in question. 0Day exploits can fetch a lot of money on the open market and if companies don't want those exploits published to the public then they will have to compete with the open market to obtain them.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Don't call yourself a "whitehat" if you refuse to behave honorably unless paid a "bounty".
Back in my day, we just tried to follow "responsible disclosure", and reported vulnerabilities because it made the world a safer place.
This kind of stunt undermines that, by making responsible researchers (like me) more easily confused with actual blackmailers.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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Apple is rather clear without actually saying it. I really doesn't have interest in the Macintosh platform and OS X.
Getting a MacBook Pro or a Powerbook back a decade ago, you really got a high end laptop, and for the Time they were attractive units. OS X based on a real Unix Kernel, gave it unprecedented security and stability, all the features that Linux had, plus a UI more advanced then Windows.
Now OS X is showing its age, the updates on both the hardware and the OS have been lackluster. If I showed you a 2001 Titanium Powerbook. and the latest Macbook Pro, they will look rather similar. Gray, brushed metal clamshell laptop.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's NOT a requirement that companies offer bug bounties, just as it's not a requirement that people who find these exploits are required to report them to the company in question. 0Day exploits can fetch a lot of money on the open market and if companies don't want those exploits published to the public then they will have to compete with the open market to obtain them.
^^This. No one is under any ethical or legal obligation to report their discovered bugs to Apple (as the way it should be).
Legal? You're absolutely right. But if your ethics allow you to say "I know a way to harm many, many people. There's an action I could take, requiring very little time or effort, which could mitigate that. But I choose not to do it unless I get paid." then you're pretty much a piece of shit, ethically speaking.
It's a Youtube video of some sort of program running. How do we know that the program can proceed without root (or admin user) access? For all we know, the program is given an admin password in its config files -- there's no real proof that it can proceed without credentials.
Apple can't afford ...
It is hard to believe someone could write that seriously.
Apple has around $240 billion cash on hand. They could allocate $10 billion to nothing but awards for bug fixes and they wouldn't even feel it. Arguably they could do that every year.
The distinction is likely the amount of time invested. I would hazard you stumbled across them or find them via some minor poking which is distinctly different from today where researchers are writing complex software and spending inordinate amounts of time.
Of course the clear answer would be if you're looking to get paid not to bother with vendors that won't compensate you for the time invested.
A true black hat would be getting whatever they could for the bug on the black market (and silently hurting Apple's customers), rather than taking an action that could (a) help Apple help its customers better long-term (even if there is short term pain) and (b) help other security researchers (who also have to eat, after all) by forcefully pointing out Apple's current policy. If Apple changes the policy to a researcher's liking, that researcher could decide to invest time and effort on Apple stuff; otherwise, perhaps the researcher might decide that his efforts are better spent helping other companies that show how much they appreciate the efforts of external researchers.
Or the researcher might just decide that, since Apple has a huge user base and a demonstrated lack of commitment to security, it should be a fertile hunting ground if he wishes to go over to the dark side.
Go buy a bright purple Dell laptop then. Mac owner are the people who care about how well something functions, not how it looks.
Too bad you weren't there to tell that to Steve Jobs 20 years ago. You could have helped Apple avoid wasting billions of dollars on Lucite.
ONLY issue? Please. Soldered-in non-upgradeable RAM and storage are major issues, since Apple charges sodomizing prices for more RAM and/or SSD. A battery that's not easily replaced below the touchpad and keyboard is another issue (it tends to swell, breaking the parts above it). USB-C ports only, check. In the real world, people still need other ports and shouldn't have to carry dongles.
No. Thinkpad owners are the ones that care about function over looks. X and T series beat the socks off of Macbooks, but are ugly as sin. They can even run "borrowed" copies of OS X if you don't care about taking food out of Timmy-boy's mouth,
Is it ethical for Apple or its customers to expect outsiders to spend hundreds or thousands of man hours finding bugs in their software for free? Apple is certainly rich enough to either pay bounties or to hire an army of security researchers to test their products.
Assuming this is a real exploit (for all we know, the program he ran had root credentials saved!), isn't it better that he revealed it to the public vs selling it to the highest black-hat bidder?
I was going to post about the "it certainly looks like blackmail" aspect of this. If Apple doesn't want to offer bug bounties, that is their choice. That choice does not give anyone a bye to act in an unethical manner.
Then, when you tell the company about the exploit, and they ignore it for an entire year, what should you do? At some point, you have an obligation to make the exploit public so that the company is forced to deal with it, instead of letting others who discovered it in private exploit it freely. It's why Google has a responsible disclosure policy that involves telling the company privately for a certain amount of time, then a public disclosure a set number of days after.
They're overpriced and underwhelming, way more than before. I had one of the first intel xeon Mac Pros, and at the time if you tried to build or buy something similar it would be about the same price for the components. Now you're touting the new mac mini as being fantastic?
You can build one for about half the price that's smaller and faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Apple computers are not a compelling value.
Apple has around $240 billion cash on hand. They could allocate $10 billion to nothing but awards for bug fixes and they wouldn't even feel it. Arguably they could do that every year
Yeah, or they could hire enough people to find (and prevent!) the bugs before they reach customers. But clearly, they don't care enough to do that. And the only way to make them care is public disclosure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
using:
security dump-keychain -d login.keychain > keychain.txt
in the terminal works rather nicely. this used to do so without authentication for the individual items.
newer versions of macOS now ask for user password before revealing passwords — but for a long time, and for older systems, this works quite nicely.
2cents from slushy toronto
john p
1) He hasn't released how to actually exploit it.
2) This is a five, maybe six, figure bug on the black market.
3) He's simply saying 'Hey, wake up, you're doing a giant disservice to all your users by pushing people to the black market.'
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
In "protest of a lack of bug bounties" this individual is:
1. Posting a YouTube video showing a purported P1, 0day security exploit.
2. Not releasing any information on how to reproduce or resolve their expoit.
3. Holding out for Apple to pay a "bug bounty" (read: ransom)
We're through the looking glass is this is what qualifies as "security research" nowadays.
Seriously, anyone who would reveal such info for vindictive purposes deserves to suffer.
What info?
Fuck this prick.
Stop sucking Apple's.
If he deserves to have his fingers broken for announcing that he has found a severe security problem (but not how to exploit it) what do Apple programmers deserve for creating it with their incompetence? What does Apple management deserve for letting it be created, and for being unwilling to pay bounties, which have been proven effective in getting researchers to disclose bugs to vendors instead of selling them on the black market?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple has billions of $ invested; it's not sitting in a bank. They have become a Mutual Fund which pays dividends on their stock. They could probably transition into a full blown fund and stop making anything.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Just because you want to blackmail him into giving his work for free to Apple doesn't mean that's the ethical choice. As long as he is not DIRECTLY harming others, his disclosures still fall on the ethical side. You, however, fall on the "troll" side.
White hats were reporting exploits long before you could make money with it, the money is not some inherent right. The guy is not a white hat, he's an asshat.
They're overpriced and underwhelming, way more than before. I had one of the first intel xeon Mac Pros, and at the time if you tried to build or buy something similar it would be about the same price for the components. Now you're touting the new mac mini as being fantastic?
You can build one for about half the price that's smaller and faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
FWIW, the Mac Mini was always overpriced, from the first day that the Intel version shipped. Competing on cost was never Apple's strong point, though they were usually within a few percent on high-end models in their base configuration (with no extra RAM or HD upgrades). Their upgrades have almost always historically been more expensive than buying the machine in the base configuration, buying the upgrade outright, and throwing away the parts you took out.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Is it ethical for Apple or its customers to expect outsiders to spend hundreds or thousands of man hours finding bugs in their software for free? Apple is certainly rich enough to either pay bounties or to hire an army of security researchers to test their products.
apple didn't expect or require anything from him. he knew before he started that apple doesn't pay bounties for bugs and he still chose to spend his time and effort looking for a bug specifically so he could release it into the wild. he could have spent his time researching software from a company that does pay bounties for bugs.
he's a dick.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
If you think this is "blackmail" I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way blackmail works. You're supposed to *threaten* doing something bad and ask for payment in order to not do the bad thing in order to blackmail someone. Disclosure without the threat or request for payment is just a straight up "fuck you", which is very different (ethically and legally).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It's generally considered that there is an ethical obligation to report security issues.
It may be illegal to disclose those flaws publicly without notifying the company first. It's almost certainly illegal pretty much everywhere to sell them. "Give me money or I'm going to publish/sell this flaw I discovered" is likewise illegal.
Well, a fella has to make a living somehow.....
You gotta pay the bills and this kind of work takes time and effort, so.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
So a heart surgeon shouldn't expect pay? It's just an hour of him time to save a life, after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I have pressed every button on a Mac at least once and none show passwords. Do I have to type in a command line and then hit one button? In which case I can also create a complete post like this one with just one button.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
This article's summary begins with "Linuz Henze, a credible researcher....." but the linked article reports "Previously credible researcher Linuz Henze...."
Zero to hero in quick time!
It just works
Bug bounty programs are a fucking scam.
They exist only to benefit companies. They get the PR points for "caring" about security, they get the benefit of people doing their job for them for pennies on the dollar, and they get the control they truly crave. If you want that pittance you need to abide by their terms, meaning you've got to expose your real identity and wait for months for a response, and even longer for a fix (if one ever comes). If you change your mind and think it's better to go public, you get no pittance AND the company will sue you AND try to get you thrown in jail. You're no longer a security researcher, you're a HACKER!! You didn't follow RESPONSIBLE DISCLOSURE (which is entirely defined by the company and entirely ignored)!! Under the CFAA, you can go to jail for the rest of your life (every single packet you send counts as one illegal act)!! Etc.
Fuck that shit.
If you're white hat, go public on day 0 every single time. Sure, it might be a bit chaotic, but that's the ONLY way companies will start caring about security. If you want to get paid, set up a Bitcoin wallet and ask for donations. But your real bread and butter will come from consulting fees as scared people will flock to you.
If you're black hat, just sell the exploits as usual.
"I know a way to harm many, many people. There's an action I could take, requiring very little time or effort, which could mitigate that. But I choose not to do it unless I get paid."
I know a way to secure our products. There's an action I could take, requiring a little bit of capital and time, to do that. But I choose to release buggy, insecure shit."
Don't pass the buck downstream. Withholding disclosures is doubly dumb because you don't know who else has found the same flaw.
Quite the contrary -- if a flaw exists, someone else is probably already exploiting it.
I'd like to see a law requiring disclosure of vulnerabilities with penalties for non-compliance.
But first, I want a law that makes companies liable for bugs and vulnerabilities, i.e. one that outlaws most of the terms in shrink-wrap licenses. When companies actually pay damages, they'll start being A Lot More Careful.
Is it ethical for Apple or its customers to expect outsiders to spend hundreds or thousands of man hours finding bugs in their software for free?
Point me to the document / press release where Apple asks outsiders to spend thousands of many hours to find bugs.
If you're super worried about ethics you wouldn't buy the product anyway, made overseas because our standard of living makes it too expensive, but they can work them 14 hour days with no OT and lower pay than our minimum wage. Never mind any other over seas gear you buy "cheap"
Better check your own ethics before you talk about anothers.
Apple started getting rid of the headphone since they don't get royalties from it and you can purchase other brand headphones without them making money. So now you have to buy special adapters and give more money to apple if you want to use headphones.
Apple's a dick.
I didn't say there was. The unethical mention in my comment was relating to the blackmail aspect.
People are continuing to use older computers (and phones) because they stopped getting significantly better every few years quite a bit more than 5 years ago. I'm typing this on 2014 MBP because the keyboard doesn't suck (unlike my manager's 2017 MBP, which has had issues despite not being "ancient"), and Apple has not released anything portable with more than 16GB of memory. Don't need a FPS video card or a marginally supported touch bar, but rather memory for VMs connecting to different VPNs (one of the joys of consulting). Been thinking about putting Mint on it, so maybe it's time, and just deal with whatever M$ wants to re-license the W10 VMs.
Yeah, I used to use MacBooks Pros and before that PowerBooks, but I've switched to Dell Latitude. This notebook is unglamorous black plastic, but packs in a lot more functionality for the price, has three USB type A ports, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and user-replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and even keyboard and display. No-one who cares about functionality would be using a MacBook at this point.
You can build one for about half the price that's smaller and faster:
The middle third of that video is the presenter going over all the different components that don't quite work right, due to the fact that MacOS/X doesn't support that hardware.
People who buy Macs are willing to spend extra money in exchange for having a computer that "just works". For them, buying a computer that you have to futz with is like buying a pair of jeans that doesn't fit right and has to be hand-altered -- you could do that and save some money, but it's easier to just spend the extra money to get something that fits properly from the get-go. If you're only buying a computer every 3-5 years, and you're going to be spending 20+ hours a week using it, the higher Apple price only amounts to about 10 extra cents a day.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This has been known for a long time. How is this person taking credit for something we have been using to help retrieve forgotten passwords or help move a user to a new MAC??
since when do white hats do something for money.
there have been white hats who made security issues public before fixed were available, sure, but most of the time after working (or trying to work) for months with the company in questions and finally hitting a dead end. you use it as a last resort.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That logic only holds while there are no 3rd party alternatives. Since there is a viable 3rd party ecosystem, this design change doesn't necessarily net Apple any money through adapters.
That doesn't mean I am happy I don't have a new headphone adapter on my Macbook Pro. Oh wait, even their base model has one. Maybe you're talking about the iMac not having a headphone jack. Oh wait... the iMac also has a headphone jack.
So your ire must be that the most portable Apple gadgets -- the iPhone and the iPad -- no longer tether the user unless you buy a dongle. I can't get excited about that, it doesn't affect me in any way, and if I wanted to use headphones with either device I would prefer not to be tethered to the device. Of course you may have a different opinion, but it seems silly to get all worked up about it. You don't get upset because there isn't a built-in SCSI or FireWire connector on modern computers do you? Even though we can all agree that those interfaces may have some utility to some people? Apple ditched the floppy and people lost their minds. They stopped providing parallel ports and surely the gods were mad at us and we would not survive. Yet we did, and today we're happy not to be burdened with extra legacy connectors. Do you really want USB2 or USB3 connectors on a new machine? Most people probably don't.
Painting this as some conspiracy to extract money is something only the paranoid do. We're better than that.
Realistically, they should be doing something to ensure that the wrong people don't find the bugs first. Or at least keep egg from their faces.
Sorry, are you suggesting Apple doesn't do anything to ensure their products don't have bugs or security holes?
Saying the guy is a dick for revealing the exploit is like saying your neighbour is a dick for leaving a note on your door saying "Stop leaving your front door open, you will get robbed"
Uh no, it's not all like that. It's like your neighbor discovering your door is unlocked and putting a note on everyone door letting them know.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Nobody forced those users to choose Apple.
There are actually philosophical arguments to be made about why blackmail should not be illegal, but the resemblance between this and blackmail is only superficial in any case.
Actually I still have a parallel port on my PC. It also has PS2 keyboard and mouse slots, and a lot of boards I work with still have serial ports.
Going to USB 2/3 is compatible with USB 1 devices, and are only an improvement, allowing more features to be used. In fact, it consolidates it so a lot of devices can just use a single port type, instead of needing a ton of adapters to connect devices.
So your logic is shit and you know it.
This would be akin, to everyone like today using USB ports for most additional devices, and someone being like HARK! USB slots are too big! For design we use knew triangler USB ports. You'll need an adapter to connect regular square ones.
It provides no actual bonus to users, or new features or functions. It's not about technology evolving, it's a business change to get more revenue out of their users. That's all, it's shit and we can smell it, get over it, you'll hear about it.
The examples you gave -- USB1, PS2, serial -- are legacy ports. Nowadays, the vast majority of computers do not have any of these. USB3 on USB-C and Thunderbolt have replaced them. Yes USB2/3 steps down to USB1 speeds in most cases, but there are issues sometimes where it doesn't work and you actually have to replace the obsolete equipment or keep an old-style computer around. Yes, serial is sometimes used on old routers/switches which means you might need an adapter if you buy new equipment.
You seem very upset. Do you feel threatened by new things? Step off the amphetamines please.