20+ Ways to Bypass Your macOS Privacy Mechanisms

"TotallyNotAVirus.app" would like to access the camera and spy on you. To protect your privacy, Apple introduced Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) framework that restricts access to sensitive personal resources: documents, camera, microphone, emails, and more. Granting such access requires authorization, and the mechanism's main design concern was clear user consent.In this talk, we will share multiple techniques that allowed us to bypass this prompt, and as a malicious application, get access to protected resources without any additional privileges or user's consent. Together, we submitted over 40 vulnerabilities just to Apple through the past year, which allowed us to bypass some parts or the entire TCC. We also found numerous vulnerabilities in third-party apps (including Firefox, Signal, and others), which allowed us to avoid the OS restrictions by leveraging the targeted apps' privileges.In the first part of the talk, we will give you an overview of the TCC framework, its building blocks, and how it limits application access to private data. We will explore the various databases it uses and discuss the difference between user consent and user intent.Next, we will go through various techniques and specific vulnerabilities that we used to bypass TCC. We will cover how we can use techniques like process injection, mounting, application behavior, or simple file searches to find vulnerabilities and gain access to the protected resources.The audience will leave with a solid understanding of the macOS privacy restrictions framework (TCC) and its weaknesses. We believe there is a need to raise awareness on why OS protections are not 100% effective, and in the end, users have to be careful with installing software on their machines. Moreover - as we're going to publish several exploits - red teams will also benefit from the talk.