
High Sierra vulnerability exposes the password of an encrypted APFS container - cimnine
https://medium.com/@matheusmariano/new-macos-high-sierra-vulnerability-exposes-the-password-of-an-encrypted-apfs-container-b4f2f5326e79
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jmdocherty
Glass half-full: "Oops! They missed this because they were busy making all the
other stuff super-secure."

Glass half-empty: "Oh-my-goodness...what would Steve say? FFS. We can't trust
anyone any more!"

I'm inclined to be half-full.

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tinus_hn
Glass completely empty: why is the system storing your password when the
volume is not mounted so it can be revealed by the dialog?

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psychometry
Someone probably just mixed up the hash keys for the password field and the
hint field. The hint needs to be stored unencrypted so that it can be
displayed.

~~~
_jn
Agree. It's probably an issue with the form, nothing underlying. (which means
encrypted containers created via the command line should be safe from this
vulnerability?)

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jchw
So... it stores the password as a password hint?

One must wonder how Apple's QA process didn't catch something as egregious as
that in a piece of security code.

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natch
Probably some unthinking tester was just using the same string in both fields
(e.g. “test”). As a developer I’ve learned over the years not to do that. That
tester should have their work attitude adjusted and their methods thoroughly
reviewed.

~~~
headShrinker
There’s probably some easy explanation but why is there a need separate code
to store variables for the ssd vs hdd version? I would think this would be
high level code, abstracted far away from any hardware differences

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jsjohnst
I believe the SSD vs HDD issue is not about the password hint codepath, but
rather that APFS is only supported on SSDs right now.

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jaclaz
It is now officially acknowledged by Apple (though they don't seem like
treating it as a bug):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15410953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15410953)

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208168](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208168)

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runesoerensen
_" Creating a volume via diskutil, the hint, not the pw is shown. Looks like
the root cause is Disk Utility storing the password as hint."_

[https://twitter.com/felix_schwarz/status/915857500330700801](https://twitter.com/felix_schwarz/status/915857500330700801)

