Plug’nPwn – Connect to Jailbreak

https://blog.t8012.dev/plug-n-pwn/

168 62 6 years ago

blog.t8012.dev

Kednicma3• 6 years ago

I like that they explicitly call on Apple to document the method of exploitation. Apple surely has internal documentation explaining how these debug commands work.

_qulr4• 6 years ago

Has anyone noticed that this newer MacBook Pro clearly exhibits "Staingate" anti-reflecting coating peeling off the screen? (You can see it in the video.)

ebg132• 6 years ago

What makes you think it's not just filthy?

_qulr4• 6 years ago

Because I own a MacBook Pro that has developed Staingate twice (the second time after a screen replacement). If you've ever seen it IRL, it's obvious.

spacedcowboy3• 6 years ago

I suspect two things:

1) Apple will have a problem with this. They generally don’t care about small-scale things like hackintosh, but this is a bit different. Selling a device to automagically hack a key logger into a modern Mac goes over their ‘line in the sand’, I’d expect. Openly selling it is ... brave, IMHO.

2) I can see some further work on their part to beef up the security over usb-pd. Perhaps the first thing is, as the article suggests, to force external attention from the user (hold down both shift keys...) but ultimately I could see it going to challenge/response and sha256 keys or similar.

Wowfunhappy2• 6 years ago

Would Apple have a legitimate legal argument for stopping these devices? DMCA violation?

They have a real purpose as research tools...

jsiepkes2• 6 years ago

Once you find yourself against a team of lawyers funded by an organisation with basically unlimited money them not having a "legitimate legal argument" becomes less relevant.

dontcarethrow2• 6 years ago

Also: working around Apple's censorship.

judge2020• 6 years ago

They generally don’t care about small-scale things like hackintosh

They do, actually. Someone tried selling computers pre-configured with the correct hackintosh configs and Apple shut them down via a lawsuit[0]. They also got Wired to take down a video on 'how to hackintosh'[1], however the theme with these two events was that they occurred pre-2010. Given that a multitude of people have now created hackintosh tutorials, the only thing Apple would C&D now is someone doing what Psystar did and selling pre-configured machines.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation

1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/breaking-apple-suing-wired-for...

spacedcowboy3• 6 years ago

selling is the difference. If you sell to someone, you're opening the market to, well, everyone. If it takes technical expertise to do it, that itself is a sufficient limit for Apple to not really care unless you poke the bear.

Maybe Wired is a sufficiently large distribution that the same thing applies, but if these guys had just released the details, I suspect Apple would just quietly patch stuff along the lines above. Selling it means they poked the bear. With a burning torch.

aunali12• 6 years ago

Selling a device to automagically hack a key logger into a modern Mac goes over their ‘line in the sand’,

No, there is a clear distinction between what is being sold and what is being demonstrated. The latter requires additional hardware and software NOT provided with the advertised USB-PD probe being sold. Reading the end of the blog or even the product page immediately makes that distinction clear.

spacedcowboy3• 6 years ago

Maybe you're right, but I think Apple will consider that a distinction without a difference.

A thief who breaks into a car using one of those hook things for the window still needs to know what (s)he's doing. That doesn't mean you don't get a lot of police attention if you're wandering around a car-park with one of them...

The eye of Sauron will blink, swivel, and focus hard towards these guys, IMHO. Hope they have good^better lawyers.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Openly selling it is ... brave, IMHO

What basis would they have for that? Seems it falls squarely into the exceptions for any law that could conceivably form the basis for a complaint.

saagarjha2• 6 years ago

What would they do? There’s nothing illegal about selling one of these; I’m sure most of the people buying them at this point are only going to use it for security research. Heck, if I had a T2 Mac I might buy one myself…

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

There are organizations selling devices to break iPhones, Apple does not care.

mschuster912• 6 years ago

This is because in Mac portables the keyboard is directly connected to the T2 and passed through to macOS.

Oh god please tell me this is a joke... what were they thinking? Seriously?!

Bad enough most Windows laptops run the keyboard through the EC, but at least nobody outside secret services attacks them and they are diverse, while everyone and their dog is picking at the T2 chip.

barkingcat• 6 years ago

Did you know that the T2 is also the SSD controller in recent macs?

It's basically the southbridge controller for macs.

detaro• 6 years ago

Isn't that intentional so T2 + keyboard + touchbar can work as a secure system with IO to the user?

Gaelan2• 6 years ago

This isn't persistent, right? At least on iPhones, checkra1n needs to run every boot to keep the device jailbroken. So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it.

joshspankit3• 6 years ago

“as long as ______ you can trust it” is a very dangerous statement.

Persistent (and silent) hacks are kept out of the public’s eye because they get sold for six figures and higher. As soon as one of those becomes public, they are essentially worthless.

devenblake2• 6 years ago

If you're being chased after the type of people who can buy hacks for six figures or higher you're as good as dead anyway.

Gaelan2• 6 years ago

Fair enough. I guess what I meant to say is "as long as you saw it boot up with nothing in the USB ports, you don't have to worry about this particular vulnerability."

AnthonyMouse• 6 years ago

So if you saw the machine boot with nothing plugged in, you can trust it.

That's assuming they haven't just attached it to the port from the inside. Or, for that matter, replaced the entire logic board with their own, having used some less subtle attack against the original to extract and copy its secrets/data.

You can't really trust anything an attacker has had unsupervised physical access to.

jpillora• 6 years ago

Demo shows root shell. So an attacker could simply install a RAT into /Library/LaunchDaemons and it's permanent.

mrarm• 6 years ago

It's not that easy since the T2 chip runs a derivative of iOS which requires codesigning. The only problem is that the T2 rarely reboots which means that erasing any modifications from it might be difficult (as far as I am aware long pressing the power button for 10 seconds should be enough to reset both the T2 and Intel though).

It is impossible to untethered persist a modified version of MacEFI without another exploit on the T2 since it has to be signed by Apple and the signature is properly checked.

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

To me it seems like it would be persistent. They modified the EFI application which is the first thing that runs when the computer is booted.

A backdoor in there can wait for the user to type in their full disk encryption password, mount the disk, replace the kernel binary with a malicious version and then boot the system.

For good measure, repeat the above steps upon each system boot in case a system update or something overwrote the backdoored kernel.

---

This is actually similar to how Computrace/LoJack worked, except that one didn't defeat full disk encryption and would only place its payload onto unencrypted disks.

penwellr3• 6 years ago

The T2 in a portable stays on even when the Intel CPU and macOS are shutdown, so "persistence" is pretty easy (the T2 can go very very low power).

Once you own the T2 you can just disable secure boot and modify macOS anyway (like injecting EFI apps/drivers into the EFI System Partition).

fulafel• 6 years ago

Interesting that Apple has been so successful in keeping technical docs out of leaks. (Or does anyone know of cases?)

dylan604• 6 years ago

An Apple leaker would be punished much more severely than Snowden.

devenblake2• 6 years ago

Snowden exposed governmental crimes. An Apple leaker (while I support their endeavor) wouldn't be exposing anything but company secrets; the ends wouldn't legally justify the means.

hn_20591249• 6 years ago

It is also due to the fact that the T2 and cryptography team is very insular at Apple, if those documents were to be leaked then there are only a few teams where the leak could have originated and the hammer of god would be brought down.

tux1968• 6 years ago

Louis Rossmann in his videos has complained about there being no authorized way to obtain technical repair documents. But he has also said that he is lucky enough to have people (some of whom apparently work or worked at Apple) that have given him troves of such documents. I couldn't find the video where he said that again, but I did find one earlier discussion on here about it[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16832323

irjustin• 6 years ago

I'm impressed with the engineering effort jailbreakers put into doing this.

And, Apple's USB-C thunderbolt port... it's the T1000 of ports.

colejohnson66• 6 years ago

Well, Thunderbolt is basically PCIe x4 in a nice little cable. And PCIe has very wide access to the system.

zydeco2• 6 years ago

Pre-T2 macs had eficheck to verify the EFI's integrity, but with the T2 being so secure, it's not necessary anymore: https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5020911870672896

MuffinFlavored2• 6 years ago

How are these hackers modifying the EFI section without any kind of digital signature? It's really wide open for writing on all new Macs?

zydeco2• 6 years ago

The EFI firmware is validated by the T2, which then passes it on to the x86 CPU. I assume this modification would not persist after the T2 reboots.

mmastrac• 6 years ago

I'm still waiting for a jailbreak dongle for iOS that would easily allow booting in a jailbroken state. I know bootm8 was working on a full case but that seems to have died. A similar, persistent project for macs would be awesome.

penwellr3• 6 years ago

Apple has similar "magic DFU commands" for lightning, so for the iPhone X and prior this can be done via a magic cable as well... (look into the Bonobo cable)

mjg59• 6 years ago

(Comment copied over from another thread on this)

We generally assume that an attacker with physical access is going to win, but there are limits on that - the usual assumption is that it's going to take some time, and potentially leave evidence that can be picked up with enough attention to detail (such as screws not being in precisely the same alignment). This attack violates all of that - there's no physical modification of the machine, and it takes under a minute. That's the difference between an attack where you know the machine has left your control for some time and an attack that can take place while you're momentarily distracted.

The lack of response to this from Apple is deeply disappointing. The attack isn't technically persistent - rebooting the T2 will clear it. But the T2 doesn't reboot when the host OS does, and Apple haven't published any guidance on how to guarantee that it has been (eg, does holding the power button down for long enough cut power to the T2? Does performing an SMC reset? Both seem to, but is that guaranteed to be the case if the T2 is running malicious code?). In addition, the Blackbird SEP exploit probably means that we have to assume that all secrets kept in the Secure Enclave can be stolen - but we don't have a full enumeration of what those typically are, or what the total security impact of this is as a result.

Plug’nPwn – Connect to Jailbreak

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