Apple Networking Security
Hacker Publishes Notorious Apple Wi-Fi Attack
Researcher David Maynor has published details of the controversial Apple Wi-Fi hack he disclosed at last year’s Black Hat conference.
Maynor had been under a nondisclosure agreement, which had previously prevented him from publishing details of the hack, but the NDA is over now and by going public with the information, Maynor hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility.”
The details were included in a paper published in the September issue of Uninformed.org, an online hacking magazine. The lengthy paper describes how to run unauthorized software on a Macintosh by taking advantage of a flaw in Apple’s AirPort wireless drivers.
Maynor said that he had been under a nondisclosure agreement, which had previously prevented him from publishing details of the hack. The security researcher wouldn’t say who his NDA was with, but that agreement is no longer in force, allowing him to talk about the exploit. “I published it now because I can publish it now,” he said.
By going public with the information, Maynor hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility. “There’s a lot of interesting information in the paper that, if you’re doing vulnerability research on Apple, you’d find useful.”
Maynor will soon publish a second paper on Uniformed.org explaining how to write software that will run on a compromised system, he said.
As for his detractors, who will say that this disclosure comes too late, Maynor says he just doesn’t care what they think. “Let them tear me apart all they want but at the end of the day the technical merit of the paper will stand on its own.”
Apple patched the bug in September 21 without crediting Maynor for discovering the problem. Instead, Apple’s engineers found the bug during an internal audit, the company said.
Source: ComputerWorld
