Conference:  Defcon 31

Authors: Jonathan Bar Or Security Researcher at Microsoft, Anurag Bohra Security Researcher at Microsoft, Michael Pearse Security Researcher at Microsoft

2023-08-01

System Integrity Protection (SIP) is a macOS technology that limits the capabilities of the root user, most notably - it maintains the integrity of the operating system by preventing loading of untrusted kernel extensions and protecting sensitive filesystem locations. In this talk we will uncover a method to bypass SIP and create undeletable malware that can later load arbitrary kernel extensions. We will explain our methodology, detail our exploitation strategy and the reverse engineering involved. Lastly, we will explain how to look for similar SIP bypasses and outline a generic detection strategy for Blue Teams.