UGN InfoManager

Munir Kotadia (News.com) reports on a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast who set up his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control. The results?

The challenger posted this message on his Web site:

"This sucks. Six hours later, this poor little Mac was owned, and this page got defaced."

The subhead reads:

Gaining root access to a Mac is "easy pickings," according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability.

Here's the FULL STORY...

BUT WAIT... THERE'S MORE...

THEN a March 7 security test revealed that despite millions of attacks and exploit scripts a similarly equipped Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001 remained untouched.

The link is: http://test.doit.wisc.edu/,
however, that web page seems to be unavailable. Cached pages revealed this:

[QUOTE]

Mac OS X Security Test
Tue 7 March 2006 11:59 PM CST (8 March 2006 0559 GMT)

The testing period is now closed.

The response has been very strong, and the test has illustrated its point. Traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps. Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus. The machine was under intermittent DoS attack. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up. The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations. There were no successful access attempts of any kind, including during the 38 hour duration of the test period, nor have their been any claims of success. The host is still the same host and configuration used for the test.
[END QUOTE]

Some snippets from 7 March 2006:

[QUOTE]
The site received almost a half a million requests via the web. There were over 4000 login attempts via ssh. The ipfw log grew at 40MB/hour and contains 6 million events logged. Several social engineering attempts were received, including one purporting to be from the government of Sweden, which apparently uses GMail. ;-) More test results and information will be published here at a future date.

Mon 6 March 2006 10:00 AM CST

In response to the woefully misleading ZDnet article Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes, an academic Mac OS X Security Test has
been launched. (Test is now concluded.)

The ZDnet article, and almost all of the coverage of it, failed to mention a very critical point: anyone who wished it was given a local account on the machine (which could be accessed via ssh). Yes, there are local privilege escalation vulnerabilities; likely some that are "unpublished". But this machine was not hacked from the outside just by being on the Internet. It was hacked from within, by someone who was allowed to have a local account on the box. That is a huge distinction.

Almost all consumer Mac OS X machines will:

Not give any external entities local account access Not even have any ports open In addition to the above, most consumer machines will also be behind personal router/firewall devices, further reducing exposure Mac OS X is not invulnerable. It, like any other operating system, has security deficiencies in various aspects of the software. Some are technical in nature, and others lend themselves to social engineering trickery.

However, the general architecture and design philosophy of Mac OS X, in addition to usage of open source components for most network-accessible services that receive intense peer scrutiny from the community, make Mac OS X a very secure operating system. There have been serious vulnerabilities in Mac OS X that could be taken advantage of; however, most Mac OS X "vulnerabilities" to date have relied on typical trojan social engineering tactics, not genuine vulnerabilities. The recent Safari vulnerability was [secunia.com] promptly addressed by Apple, as are any exploits [docs.info.apple.com] reported to Apple. Apple does a fairly good job with regard to security, and has greatly improved its reporting processes after pressure from institutional Mac OS X users: Apple is responsive to security concerns with Mac OS X, which is one of the most important pieces of the security picture.

The "Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes" story doesn't mention that local access was granted to the system. While local privilege escalation exploits can certainly be dangerous - and used in conjunction with things like the above Safari exploit - this isn't very informative with regard to the general security of a Mac OS X machine sitting on the Internet. I have commented a bit on Mac OS X security in general.

Objections to this test

Some have objected to this test as doing nothing more than testing the security of apache or ssh on a PowerPC architecture. That is correct. And that is how most of the world will see Mac OS X externally. The original article was not fair, because it did not note, or even imply, or hint in any way, that local account access was granted. The whole point of Apple using proven open source services like OpenSSH and apache on Mac OS X is exactly because of their secure nature as a result of years of scrutiny by the community. Most users of Mac OS X in a consumer or desktop setting will never even enable any of these services at all. It's unfortunate that the initial coverage was so journalistically poor and sensationalistic on what might otherwise have been an article about an interesting local vulnerability. Instead, it chose to leave people with the impression that a Mac OS X machine can be "hacked" just by doing nothing more that being on the Internet. That is patently false.
[END QUOTE]

Update

[QUOTE]

The ZDnet article has been updated to include the sentence,

> "Participants were given local client access
> to the target computer and
> invited to try their luck."

But might it not have been interesting to explore:

What are the implications of local account access, and under what conditions might a computer be used in that way?

* How can such access normally be obtained?
* Do home users behind firewalls and with
no ports open need to worry?
* How can a vendor fix the claimed local privilege escalation vulnerabilities when they are not informed of the issue?

What are the moral and ethical implications of knowing about allegedly severe vulnerabilities in products, like the "hacker" they interviewed, and actively choosing to NOT give the vendor an opportunity to fix the problem(s)?

How might a Linux or BSD distribution, other commercial UNIXes, or Windows stand up to a similar test, where anyone who wishes is given local account access?

A discussion about how since much of OS X is closed, this might make it more difficult for the community to discover - and report and fix - potential vulnerabilities in the closed pieces ......and things of that nature, instead of leaving people with the impression that any Mac OS X machine connected to the Internet can be taken over in 30 minutes?
[END QUOTE]

Posted by Dave Schroeder, University of Wisconsin

No web page could be found with the above information.