Though many security mechanisms are deployed in Apple's macOS and iOS systems, some old-fashioned or poor-quality kernel code still leaves the door widely open to attackers. Especially, as kernel's critical components, device drivers are frequently exploited to attack Apple systems. In fact, bug hunting in Apple kernel drivers is not easy since they are mostly closed-source and heavily relying on object-oriented programming. In this talk, we will share our experience of analyzing and attacking Apple kernel drivers. In specific, we will introduce a new tool called Ryuk. Ryuk employs static analysis techniques to discover bugs by itself or assist manual review.
In addition, we further combine static analysis with dynamic fuzzing for bug hunting in Apple drivers. In specific, we will introduce how we integrate Ryuk to the state-of-art Apple driver fuzzer, PassiveFuzzFrameworkOSX, for finding exploitable bugs.
Most importantly, we will illustrate Ryuk's power with several new vulnerabilities that are recently discovered by Ryuk. In specific, we will show how we exploit these vulnerabilities for privilege escalation on macOS 10.13.3 and 10.13.2. We will not only explain why these bugs occur and how we find them, but also demonstrate how we exploit them with innovative kernel exploitation techniques.
Xiaolong Bai (twitter@bxl1989, github@bxl1989) is a security engineer in Alibaba Orion Security Lab. Before joining Alibaba, he received his Ph.D. degree in Tsinghua University. He has published several research papers on top conferences including IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, CCS, NDSS, and presented his research in Black Hat USA and Hack In The Box. He has been acknowledged by famous vendors, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Evernote, and Tencent for his contribution in discovering the vulnerabilities in their systems and improving the security of their products. He is a member of the OverSky team for private jailbreaking development. @bxl1989
Min (Spark) Zheng (twitter@SparkZheng, github@zhengmin1989) is a security expert in Alibaba Orion Security Lab. He received his Ph.D. degree in the CSE department of the CUHK. His research focuses on malware analysis, smartphone (Android & iOS) security, system design and implementation. Before receiving Alibaba A-Star offer award in 2015, he worked in FireEye, Baidu and Tencent. He was the champion of GeekPwn 2014 and AliCTF 2015. He won the"best security researcher" award in FIT 2016 for detecting the iOS/macOS vulnerabilities, XcodeGhost virus and WormHole RCE vulnerability. He is a member of the OverSky team for private jailbreaking development. He presented his research in DEF CON, HITB, BlackHat, RUXCON, etc. @SparkZheng