Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
June 3, 2019 02:07 pm

Apple Still Has Problems With Stopping Synthetic Clicks

Synthetic events remain a big security hole for macOS in spite of Apple's recent efforts to prevent malicious applications from abusing this feature. From a report: Speaking at the second edition of the Objective by the Sea security conference that was held in Monaco over the weekend, Patrick Wardle, a well-known Apple security expert, has revealed a zero-day impacting Apple's macOS operating system, including the new version launched today. The zero-day is a bypass of the security protections that Apple has put in place to prevent unauthorized access to synthetic events. Synthetic events are a macOS mechanism that allows applications to automate mouse clicks and keyboard input. It was created for the sake of automation and can be used via either the Core Graphics framework or the AppleScript scripting language. [...] For almost two years now, Wardle has been looking at Apple's countermeasures aimed to prevent the abuse of synthetic events. He previously showed two methods[1, 2] of bypassing Apple's synthetic events protections, so much so that Apple decided last year to block access to synthetic events by default. But over the weekend, Wardle disclosed a new way of bypassing these latest protections, once again. "It's the gift that keeps giving," Wardle told ZDNet via email. "And actually gets more and more valuable as Apple adds more protections (privacy and security mechanisms) that can be 'allowed' by a single synthetic click." The new technique is possible because of the Transparency Consent and Control (TCC) system. Wardle says the TCC contains a compatibility database in the form of a file named AllowApplications.plist. This file lists apps and app versions that are allowed to access various privacy and security features, including synthetic events.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CoT9YF1SLAk/apple-still-has-problems-with-stopping-synthetic-clicks

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot