

Hacking keystroke logger into Apple Keyboard Firmware - futuremint
http://www.digitalsociety.org/apple-keyboards-hacked-and-possessed/

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blasdel
The conference paper: [http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-
usa-09/CHEN/BHUSA09...](http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-
usa-09/CHEN/BHUSA09-Chen-RevAppleFirm-PAPER.pdf)

I submitted it the other day but somehow it got 0 points:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737186>

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ubernostrum
Well, my first impression on reading about this was, basically, "OK, so if
somebody manages an exploit which gives them total control of the computer,
they can use it to... have total control of the computer. This is news?"

If (that's a big if) this can be made practical, the fact that it depends on
you already owning the machine before you use it seems to make it
unattractive; if you've already got that access, there's more interesting
stuff you can do.

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uybuyvg
Or with a USB key and 18seconds alone with a machine you can undetectably
infect it in such a way that a full disk wipe and reinstall doesn't clean it.

More interesting now?

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ubernostrum
So now it's "someone who has unfettered physical access to the machine can
take advantage of that"?

I'm just not impressed in general by hacks which begin with "first you must
achieve a complete breach of the target machine's security..."

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asciilifeform
The $64,000 question: Why is Apple shipping keyboards with flashable firmware?
The USB keyboard standard has been finalized for a rather long time.

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bonaldi
As the article says: they ship hardware after virtually no public testing, so
they often find bugs. More than one model of Apple keyboard has required
updates in the field. $64k, please.

On the other hand: physical access to hardware leads to pwnage, film at 11.

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extension
The attack doesn't require physical access. It makes rooting potentially
undetectable and unfixable.

It also uses a very unexpected attack vector, which means there could be some
surprising effects. Remember slow-propogating floppy disk viruses? Think about
the way keyboards are shuffled around offices.

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sorbits
Article says: _“he feared harassment from staunch Apple fans who actually
believe those Mac versus PC security commercials”_.

Here’s an advice, don’t make statements like _“the many weaknesses in Mac OS X
and Apple applications”_ or _“Apple had a tendency to rush hardware to
market”_ unless you can back these up.

You already made a significant exploit which no-one can dispute, don’t give
_“staunch Apple fans”_ a reason to dismiss the article.

~~~
extension
He backs them up with a link at the beginning of the article.

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habs
Is it just me, or has there been an increase in the amount of attacks on apple
hardware? Either that or I just seem to be more aware of them.

Apple's increasing popularity seems to be attracting more hackers to target
the platform. This attack combined with an iTunes Buffer Overflow attack could
lead to fair amount of serious security breaches.

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ubernostrum
"Is it just me, or has there been an increase in the amount of attacks on
apple hardware?"

People love to be in the spotlight. If you can produce a story which involves
Apple, you will get to be in the spotlight. It's as simple as that.

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sh1mmer
I think this is interesting but if you have enough physical access to the
computer to install a keyboard that is compromised then you probably already
enough access to compromise the computer in dozens of other ways.

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st3fan
I would be more worried if they had found a way to broadcast keystrokes over
bluetooth on the nice wireless keyboard that I am using now :-)

Just place a rogue receiver somewhere near.

