Two hours into his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer's Conference last June, senior vice president Craig Federighi revealed a new privacy feature in MacOS Mojave that forces applications to ask the user if they want to "allow" or "deny" any request to access sensitive components and data, including the camera or microphone, messages, and browsing history. The audience dutifully applauded. But when ex-NSA security researcher Patrick Wardle watched that keynote at his home in Maui a few months later, he had a more dubious reaction.
Over the previous year, he had uncovered a way for malware to invisibly click through those prompts, rendering them almost worthless as a security safeguard—not once, but twice. After Wardle had revealed the bugs that allowed those click attacks—one before the WWDC keynote and another one two months later—Apple had fixed them. Now Wardle was watching Apple market those safeguards as an example of its devotion to security in its upcoming operating system.
Yesterday, just ahead of this year's WWDC, he's punched a hole in those protections for a third time. Exploiting a bug in Mojave, Wardle has shown yet again that any piece of automated malware can exploit a feature of MacOS known as "synthetic clicks" to breeze through security prompts, allowing the attacker to gain access to the computer's camera, microphone, location data, contacts, messages, and even in some cases to alter its kernel, adding malicious code to the deepest part of the operating system.
"The ability to generate synthetic clicks is more interesting than ever from an attacker's point of view," Wardle told WIRED ahead of a talk about the vulnerability he gave yesterday at a confer ..
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