John Gruber issues open challenge to MacBook Wi-Fi hackers

First time I've heard Pete Shipley called a "Mac blogger", and I shared a house with him.  The only Apple systems in the place were mine. 8)

These "challenges" are nothing more than little publicity stunts, and Mac bloggers seem to love doing them. First Shipley, now Gruber.

#14

Right...

(access@s642)(~)$ sudo -s
Password:

sudo in OS X is by default set to ask for password from users in the admin group.

Not refuting your other points though.

Raphael,

That is the point. Gruber, and many others, state that the attack was indeed one about external wifi via PCMCIA stule cards, and the third party drivers, yet, it was presented with the intent of showing the MacBook itself at fault.

The thing is, not too many people are going to be using an external wifi antenna in a notebook that ships with its own internal AirPort card.

See this is where the mac community really messes up. OS X is secure, but its not bullet proof (and this is proved by the sheer amount of unreleased exploit code for Tiger alone)

The quote "Well that way, the user may be admin but root is disabled completely. Any task from terminal that requires root has to be a per command "sudo" you can't "su" to become root.

Futher any desktop task that need permissions asks for a password."

is utter bollocks:

"oooh:~ daniel$ sudo su
oooh:/Users/daniel root# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel), 1(daemon), 2(kmem), 3(sys), 4(tty), 29(certusers), 8(procview), 5(operator), 9(procmod), 80(admin), 20(staff)
oooh:/Users/daniel root#

Furthermore OS X is littered with loads of setuid programs which are terrible at ensuring non root users can execute them and gain the permissions that root generally has

Right, so you CANT su from normal user to root?

Seriously if you DONT work in security, dont try and pretend you know what your talking about

Nice challenge. I do however question the not joining a default network; I do not know of the original claims (and I am not very versed in Wi-Fi either), however, if you not join a network, what are the changes that you can be hacked in the first place? Or did they (Maynor/Elich) claim that the exploits could be done, just by having Wi-Fi enabled?

Niels

Your link to Gruber's blog is bad. You have two http's in the url.

Raphael:

There is a good chance to native drivers were used in the video-taped attack. See what Jim Thompson has to say about an analysis of the video.

If the native drivers were used, it is likely that the 1) attack is a complete hoax (think SSH) or 2) the target MacBook had to have an open shell to trigger a connection back. If #1, then Gruber wins. If #2, then a draw -- without the shell open the Maynor/Ellch attack might only crash the airport drivers.

I think "M" (#8, #9) is John Gruber's wife. Or kid looking to protect a college fund. :-)

ps if he loses surely we should all club together and help him recover his money as a thanks to finding out what the other guy is holding.