Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Malware that uses this exploit to cause damage is a straight up attack on users. Merely revealing a vulnerability isn't an attack. The vulnerability was there all along, and there's no guarantee that this person is the only one who could find it, or even the first.

I'm all for responsible disclosure. But I think we need to clarify good and bad here. Responsible disclosure is better than just announcing findings to the world, but telling people about what you've discovered is not bad.

View on HN

Telling people about what you have discovered is bad if you can reasonably tell that those people are bad actors who will use the information you are giving them to do harm.

That's why it's responsible to tell the people who can be responsible for mitigating the problem in sufficient time for them to propagate a fix before publicizing the exploit in the knowledge that you are giving it to bad actors.

The fact that the vulnerability existed before and may have even been being exploited does absolutely nothing to change this.

If it was already being exploited but isn't publicly known then irresponsible disclosure simly makes the problem worse by increasing its availability to more bad actors who weren't previously in the know.

There's writing a nicely worded letter, and sending it in a rose scented envelope. And then there's scribbling a note, tying it to a rock, and throwing it through the window.

Telling the world via a fully working exploit causes a ton of collateral damage, and the author made no effort at all to reduce the impact. Waiting for 10.10.5 and releasing it on a Saturday afternoon makes it seem like the point was to cause as big a mess as possible.

Maybe Saturday afternoon just happened to be when he finished.

And no, it's not like throwing a rock through somebody's window. The information may be used by other people to cause damage, but the mere act of releasing it is not by itself damaging. Let's put blame where it belongs: on the people actually using exploits for bad purposes. If you want to encourage responsible disclosure, don't lead with bad analogies about what happens when you announce a vulnerability to the world, because it just reduces your credibility.

for the record: i had no idea yesterday was saturday at the time I dropped the code.

Nothing says "hardcore hacker at work" quite like forgetting what day of the week it is.

Nothing says 'irresponsible' like not thinking at all about the impact of releasing information you know people will use for harm. Publishing to github comes after the hacking.

If qwertyoruiop had instead come up with plans for making a suitcase nuke from household ingredients, or for breeding an Ebola analog using a home beer making kit, your argument would imply that you think that posting them on the Internet would not be bad.

I disagree.

And again with the ridiculous analogies.

It's really difficult to have a serious discussion about computer security vulnerabilities when people keep comparing it to throwing rocks through windows or weapons of mass destruction.

And yes, it's relevant, because the severity of a problem can and does influence how problematic various approaches are.

This is a local root exploit. Those are common and not generally problematic. The barrier to escalating from a normal user to root is at best the absolute last line of defense, and often completely irrelevant. It's a problem that should be fixed, don't get me wrong, but the severity is about 2 out of 10.

The fact that I think it's not a bad thing to release information like this has no bearing on what I would think about releasing information on building a suitcase nuke from household ingredients.

Could we try to keep the conversation grounded, here?

If you had been saying before now that this wasn't a severe bug and so we shouldn't be too concerned about disclosure, then you wouldn't have been presented with these strong counterarguments.

But that isn't what you've been saying - rather, you've been making the general argument that releasing information is not damaging or bad, and that we should only hold the people who exploit vulnerabilities responsible - not those who disclose them. Multiple people have argued against you on this.

Now you have switched your position to 'It's not bad to disclose vulnerabilities unless they are severe'. This seems much more reasonable, and came as the consequence of you being presented with what you are calling 'ridiculous' analogies.

To me this seems like a serious discussion done right.

> and the author made no effort at all to reduce the impact

http://github.com/kpwn/NULLGuard

Thank you. Any particular reason you decided to lead with the exploit and not this patch?

I did not have the patch ready when the exploit was published, that's the only reason why. I had my reasons to publish the exploit in public yesterday, but all I can say is "no comment".

Just for the record: I did inform Apple beforehand. Not so much before, but before.

I do not consider this to be their fault in any way as someone in this thread seems to be implying. Again, I had my reasons to drop such a thing publicly. I've had this for months, and I did not intend on disclosing at all. Proof of my "for months" assertion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8arPid8GtFk

> As a bare minimum Apple needs a few hours to analyze the bug

Again, for the record: Apple has full details of the underlying bug. They won't even need to check my github at all.

The video mentions iOS being vulnerable (around 1:00), but the exploit doesn't mention it. How vulnerable is iOS?

iOS is vulnerable too as far as the vulnerability is concerned. It is not directly exploitable on iOS, however having a NULL task_t still does give you some abilities, even if not (directly?) SVC code exec.

That restores some of my faith in humanity, thank you. We'll be looking at the kext today at work, but due to Apple's kext signing requirements I don't know how feasible it is to roll it out.

I have asked on Twitter if anyone could sign it for me. For some reason neither of the two people who tried to do so were able to sign it. No idea why. kexts were signed but they kept getting rejected for some reason.

You need a developer ID with kext signing ability, not a regular developer ID:

https://www.google.com/search?num=30&q=site%3Adeveloper.appl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com