For what it's worth, we're talking about mostly personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones here - not corporate servers. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the "physical access" requirement, although that does at least make it difficult for attackers to exploit the vulnerability at a large scale.
With the former, the device is already stolen. The only difference here is that the thief can re-sell it. That's not a huge win for the user who it was stolen from.
With the latter, you need ongoing physical access in order to install and maintain a presence on the device. That's a sophisticated attack, but sophisticated attackers already have ways of doing this.
I don’t think that’s 100% true. Yes, you need persistent hardware to re-root the T2 on every reboot. But what about a one and done T2 attack - a drive by keylogger installer? Get credentials and then mount a more traditional attack to install APT/RAT.
Also from my reading of that, the T2 chip doesn't reboot with the laptop -- it stays powered on at all times after it first starts up. If that's really the case, a reboot won't do much except kill non-persistent things that are running on macOS itself.
So, a) a T2 hack persists until such reinstall and b) you don’t need a persistent beachhead if you’ve taken the hill and maintain persistence there. This exploit opens the door to that, and you can install keyboard intercepts via the new System Extensions Interface. Did it yesterday myself via an update to Karibiner. Notarization can be disabled by interrupting the network pathway and you can definitely disable SIP after you capture the password. In essence, T2 is the lynchpin that prevents the defeat of other aspects of macOS security.
> This makes it more attractive to do without stealing, but that's an attack style that is only really done by state level threats, and one that was still possible anyway, because hardware access is essentially game-over anyway at that point.
My thought was that the T2 chip is responsible for rate-limiting access to the Secure Enclave. Specifically, for rate-limiting attempts to derive a key from as user-supplied password and the secret in the Secure Enclave.
This allows for weaker passwords to be used, because brute-forcing requires the secure-enclave in the loop, and access to that enclave is rate-limited. Drop that rate-limiting, and the brute-force attack becomes a lot more viable.
As far as I know, this was at stake when the FBI wanted apple's help a while ago to decrypt an Iphone. However, I have no idea whether this is the same scheme used for MacOS devices. Nor do I know whether the T2 chip is actually responsible for rate-limiting.
a) An unattended laptop can be compromised in under five mins, all without any obvious indications. There are also loaner situations, at schools etc. where machines are shared.
b) no specialized hardware is necessary, so it's really cheap to execute.
c) this is probably the worst part - power cycling the laptop does not reset the T2 ("The T2 chip is fully booted and stays on, even if your Mac device is shutdown.") - so there's no practical way to ensure that your machine is not compromised after a brief interlude. For extra fun, if it turns out the attack can be executed by a malicious wall port, then things start to get really interesting.
They could also install a hardware keylogger, so a non-exploitable T2 doesn't really help here in the general case. We just have to hope that the TSA aren't at the level of your average state actor.
1). send it to apple(or respective company) and if they don't respond after followups, put it on internet 2) put it on internet so it gains popularity and makes the aforesaid companies do something!
in some cases like these (those require physical access) this is fine, but what if someone uncovers a potential remote hack for every android or apple phone out there! which option would be ethical?
https://www.bugcrowd.com/resource/what-is-responsible-disclo...
As for security for "other users" - users with high security requirements can be targeted, even with a locked system.
As an example - if someone messes with my laptop while I'm away, TPM will fail and Windows will demand I re-enter my bitlocker key upon start. If you can suppress that - that's a big issue.
They don't care enough to be inconvenienced for it, but they do care when their identity is stolen, when they are blackmailed with photos, etc.
This is what's good about the T2, it secures those sorts of things for regular users in a very convenient way. This vulnerability does not appear to really change that for regular users (although it likely does for orgs with high security requirements, i.e. those considering an APT part of their threat model).
Even without this, many people could be owned just by installing a key logger on their external keyboard which would likely be easier to access and hack than the T2/ laptop.
The thing is, can't you just stick a keylogger onto the machine at this point and get an equivalent compromise? I log you login and then use that to authenticate?
Its probably a good idea to get a new Arm Mac as your next Macbook Pro because the T2 chip doesn't even need to be there anymore.
It’s not there as a ‘bridge’ - plenty of macs without T2 processors run macOS 11 and Siri with full feature parity, and neither of those things relies on the T2.
(This is why you can’t install OSes other than macOS on these devices. It’s not because of DRM or anything—though that’s an aspect of it. Rather, it’s because the T2 is in control of boot, and no other OS has had a second-stage bootloader written for it that will load onto the T2 chip to do hardware bringup from that side.)
Maybe “bridge” is the wrong word here—though I can see the meaning. A precise term, I think, would be “polyfill.” The T2 is the place where Apple is putting 1. its IP-core customizations that it can’t just plop into the Intel CPU, because it doesn’t control the Intel CPU; and 2. its top-level “BIOS-alike”, allowing them to bring up the hardware in a way they control, rather than having to convince the Intel CPU to do it in a way it understands.
The T2 and the Intel CPU acting together, roughly simulates an architecture akin to that of an ARM Mac (as with any other polyfill, where the old runtime and the polyfill acting together roughly simulate the capabilities of the new runtime.)
The interesting thing about this, is that it’s likely that because the polyfill roughly simulates the environment of an ARM mac (where these IP cores are accessible directly through the CPU, and where hardware bringup is always done in Apple’s preferred fashion without having to trick the Intel CPU into it), the drivers written for Intel-plus-T2 macOS, are also likely able to be run with only small changes, directly on ARM macOS.
That’s why the GP is calling the T2 a “bridge”: it’s a half-step across the chasm between the archtectures; an intermediate architectural target that allows some but not all of the work of developing ARM macOS to be done before any Apple Silicon ARM platforms like the A14Z were actually available to be developed on.
That’s not true. The camera use indicator light is hardwired into the camera circuitry and turns on when the sensor is powered up. There is no “software” involved in turning on the camera use indicator light.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/devel...
How difficult would it be to steal someone's phone, but illegal stuff on it, and call the police? Could you figure it out for 10k USD?
I can think of so many more much more significant security issue, from remote root access to windows machines, potentially intentionally flawed VPN security, TPM on intel machines that are remotely exploitable and provide persistent access to machine and the list goes on and on.
There is something about Apple that makes folks blow up. Perhaps it's just they are one of the few with a bit of a reasonable reputation here.
Steal someone's phone? You realize iphones since Xs forward are using A12+ chips, they don't even have the intel / T2 combo being talked about as far as I know. And then to get access you need to install a keylogger PHYSCIALLY into the macbook. All this is "possible", but you can probably do a keylogger without breaking T2 and get equivalent access at the end of the day.
The overseas android market is a wasteland security side - no one even pretends, they don't even keep the phones updated.
Which exists on likely 99% of people's setups, Mac, Windows, whatever. Keyloggers on external keyboards, keyboard hacks, bios hacks...
> Stolen phones, people incarcerated
This hack doesn't unencrypted the drive, so this hack won't help if you just steal someone's laptop. You have to get physical access, hack the T2, then get it back into their hands so they can put their password in to decrypt the drive.
> How difficult would it be to steal someone's phone, but illegal stuff on it...
This hack affects MacBooks & Macs with the T2 security chip installed, not about phones.
- Requires physical device access.
- Cannot decrypt FileVault without you entering decryption key post-exploitation.
- Cannot access secrets in the Secure Enclave.
This isn't great, but it's not really a huge security issue? The main attack vector here is stolen Macs being re-sold as they can be "un-bricked".
I know part of the point of the T2 is to make physical access less interesting an attack vector, but it's typically doing so after a machine has been stolen. This makes it more attractive to do without stealing, but that's an attack style that is only really done by state level threats, and one that was still possible anyway, because hardware access is essentially game-over anyway at that point.
I feel like this is over-blown? Am I missing something? Is there another attack vector here that's worse for "regular users"?