full-disclosure - Mac OSX 10.4 Dashboard Authentication Hijacking Vulnerability

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Message-ID: <207D19C8-2293-46C2-BD4C-A76BCDFD28D1@nuclearelephant.com>
Date: Thu May 19 15:42:12 2005
From: jonathan at nuclearelephant.com (Jonathan Zdziarski)
Subject: Mac OSX 10.4 Dashboard Authentication Hijacking
	Vulnerability

>
> Ok im running 10.4.1, i have a piece of javascript which calls sudo,
> yet im asked for my password straight after the sudo call has been
> made, therefore it WILL not run automatically.In order for you to have
> this fully exploitable widget, you would need the user to 1st call
> sudo to perform and action and then have the widget piggyback onto
> that session, surely?

Right. If you call sudo for anything else on your system, the widget  
can hijack this because Apple's implementation of sudo comes default  
with a grace period.

> with 10.4.1, once any widget has been downloaded, the user is
> presented with a box warning of the danger. If they do not do
> anything, the download DOES not take place and there is no code stored
> on the system.

Actually they're not prompted to execute it. They're prompted to  
download it. The user has the option to either download and install,  
or not download at all. But even without auto-install, this is still  
an issue, as people are likely to run several widgets without any  
knowledge of a trojan. Like I said in an earlier reply, you have 5-10  
widgets all running in the background, invisible to a user, and the  
nature of widgets themselves make them ideal targets for malware.  
They're small applications that don't fall under the same scrutiny as  
other applications.

> I'm all for people finding holes in operating systems and reporting
> them, but with a matter like this it seems that there is more
> theoretical exploitation than actual exploitation.
> Tell you what, write up a bad widget and send it to us and lets see if
> we can replicate it..
>
> ps.. http://www.apple.com/support/security/

Just add this line to any existing widget's "show" code, or  
background code if it has any:

widget.system("sudo id >> /tmp/out", null);

Then at some point in the future, authenticate for something. The  
next time the widget code runs (which could be in the background  
depending on the widget, or next time you view the dashboard), you'll  
see root in that file.

This is not a hard concept to grasp.

> that e-mail address works, ive sent in a few issues myself regarding
> 10.3 and had no problems so far

Thanks for the link.

Jonathan

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