Posted on 03/16/2017 9:32:34 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Day one results have already been published over at the Zero Day Initiative website, with a couple of successful Mac-related exploits already appearing in the list of achievements. Independent hackers Samuel Groß and Niklas Baumstark landed a partial success and earned $28,000 after targeting Safari with an escalation to root on macOS, which allowed them to scroll a message on a MacBook Pro Touch Bar.
In a partial win, Samuel Groß (@5aelo) and Niklas Baumstark (@_niklasb) earn some style points by leaving a special message on the touch bar of the Mac. They used a use-after-free (UAF) in Safari combined with three logic bugs and a null pointer dereference to exploit Safari and elevate to root in macOS. They still managed to earn $28,000 USD and 9 Master of Pwn points.Later in the day, Chaitin Security Research Lab also targeted Safari with an escalation to root on macOS, finding success using a total of six bugs in their exploit chain, including "an info disclosure in Safari, four type confusion bugs in the browser, and a UAF in WindowServer". The combined efforts earned the team $35,000.
The participating teams earned a total of $233,000 in prizes on day one, including a leading $105,000 earned by Tencent Security, according to published details. Other software successfully targeted by contestants include Adobe Reader, Ubuntu Desktop, and Microsoft Edge on Windows.
Apple representatives have attended the Pwn2Own contest in the past, and affected parties are made aware of all security vulnerabilities discovered during the contest in order to patch them. Pwn2Own day two begins today at 8:30 a.m. Pacific and will involve additional exploit attempts against macOS and Safari.
Pinging dayglored and Shadow Ace for their interest and ping lists.
The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me
Cue the trolls who will ravish the thread with “see? SEE? macOS isn’t perfectly secure!” and conveniently avoid/ignore the observation that it took some of the best in the field to find the problems, which will likely be fixed on >90% of Macs within days.
Likewise for Linux (approximately, depending on users, which is always unpredictable); and a bit longer for Windows, since the March Patch Tuesday was only released two days ago so the next one is a month out, assuming they don't delay it an additional month like they did in February (very unlikely).
Which is precisely why I'm -not- going to ping the Windows list to this thread. :-)
When I find an article that talks about the IE/Edge exploits, I'll post that and ping the Winlist. If you happen to see one, let me know... thanks!
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