Apple macOS High Sierra Exploit Lets Hackers Steal Keychain Passwords in Plaintext
Sep 26, 2017
Apple yesterday rolled out a new version of its macOS operating system, dubbed High Sierra 10.13 —a few hours before an ex-NSA hacker publicly disclosed the details of a critical vulnerability that affects High Sierra as well as all earlier versions of macOS. Patrick Wardle, an ex-NSA hacker and now head of research at security firm Synack, found a critical zero-day vulnerability in macOS that could allow any installed application to steal usernames and plaintext passwords of online accounts stored in the Mac Keychain. The macOS Keychain is a built-in password management system that helps Apple users securely store passwords for applications, servers, websites, cryptographic keys and credit card numbers—which can be accessed using only a user-defined master password. Typically no application can access the contents of Keychain unless the user enters the master password. "I discovered a flaw where malicious non-privileged code (or apps) could programmatically access th...