"SecureWorks has not shared or demonstrated any code in relation to the Black Hat-demonstrated exploit that is relevant to the hardware and software that we [Apple} ship."

"As part of a responsible disclosure policy, we [SecureWorks] are not disclosing the name of the third-party wireless device driver until a patch is available."

And how is Apple or anyone supposed to write a patch if SecureWorks doesn't give the manufacturers data on the exploit?

I'm becoming more and more dubious about the BlackHat demo. Not that what SecureWorks showed is not possible, just I'm doubting their particular demonstration of it. It's beginning to look like they are trying to publicize themselves and their company more than alert the community to a danger.

More importantly, who cares? The MacBook comes with Apple's Wi-fi card, not some third party card. Accordingly, not many users are going to be using a third party solution.

It is highly doubtful the alledged hack works on OSX using Apple's hardware and drivers. If it did, the Black Hat folks would have given Apple information concerning the hack since it alledges to have given the third parties the informaiton.

Is it really an Apple designed card with Apple drivers or some third party system that was integrated into Apple's motherboard? I don't know the answer to that but the latter is more common. It's why MacBook Pros come with ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics rather than an Apple graphics card.

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geoduck wrote:
Is it really an Apple designed card with Apple drivers or some third party system that was integrated into Apple's motherboard? I don't know the answer to that but the latter is more common. It's why MacBook Pros come with ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics rather than an Apple graphics card.

I think we can assume that Apple knows what they're putting in their machines. Come on, even the *processor* is third-party. They're in control of what goes in and, since they offer a reasonable (if not large) amount of upgradeability, you can be 99% sure that anything that Apple puts into one of their computers would be as good--or better--than anything they'd be making themselves. (Come on, they're not a graphics card company! Or a WIFI card manufacturer! Or a processor developer!)

The vulnerability here would be in the driver itself. So the key to this is determining the source of the driver. I would not be surprised if they used a 3rd party card which had an open source driver available and engineered the flaw into that driver themselves to simulate a flaw that someone else already discovered in a windows driver or the windows kernel or wherever it is that the windows flaw exists. This is of course assuming that the video they showed wasn't all staged to begin with.

Even if they didn't create the driver themselves, you don't take a kernel extension written by a 3rd party and then tell the world that the kernel itself has a fundamental flaw. If you do that then you are lying. Especially people who are so "knowledgeable" about the internals of operating systems.

macnn.com and mdn have stories that say secureworks lied and there is no wireless threat as they modified a macpro to try and fool everyone into believing that they found an exploit.
THEY DID NOT!!

I think we'll find out, soon, that they didn't exploit any driver or any WiFi card, from Apple or any third party. The whole thing will be shown to be a parlor trick. Look at the video. They get access to UNIX shell, yet claim the same hack would work on Windows. Note also that the shell looks slightly different than a normal shell script (they turned of any prompt, which is a trivial thing to do), in an attempt to make it look like they didn't just ssh from one machine to another.

Which is exactly what, it will be shown, they did. So they had two computers on the same wireless network, and used one to ssh to the other? Say it isn't so! Oh wait, that's called normal behavior. They could have connected an Ethernet cable and done the same thing, but that wouldn't make for nearly as good of a show.

Mark my words: SecureWorks found no flaw whatsoever.

It doesn't matter if there was a real exploit or not, a lot of people will only believe what they first heard. Months from now you will be in a conversation with some Dell user and they will mention the Mac's WiFi weakness. It is just like the OSX virus/worm/malware that hit the news now and then.