I've got 99 Problems, but Little Snitch ain't one

Presented at DEF CON 24 (2016), Aug. 6, 2016, 4 p.m. (30 minutes)

Security products should make our computers more secure, not less. Little Snitch is the de facto personal firewall for OS X that aims to secure a Mac by blocking unauthorized network traffic. Unfortunately bypassing this firewall's network monitoring mechanisms is trivial...and worse yet, the firewall's kernel core was found to contain an exploitable ring-0 heap-overflow. #fail Though briefly touching on generic firewall bypass techniques, this talk will largely focus on the kernel-mode vulnerability. Specifically, I’ll discuss bypassing OS X specific anti-debugging mechanisms employed by the product, reverse-engineering the firewall's I/O Kit kernel interfaces and 'authentication' mechanisms, and the discovery of the exploitable heap-overflow.

Finally, methods of exploitation will be briefly discussed, including how an Apple kernel-fix made this previously un-exploitable bug, exploitable on OS X 10.11

So if you simply want to see yet another 'security' product fall, or more generically, learn methods of OS X kernel extension reversing in a practical manner, then this talk is for you :)


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