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Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

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Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#51

Post by nickpsecurity »

protomyth wrote: post #50
nickpsecurity wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one building, friends and I rigged every machine to have hidden copies of Alien vs Predator and Everquest. I modified the system software to intercept keystrokes before they got to the game. One command crashed video, audio, and then whole system. I also set others to randomly crash around same time people walked in to supervise what was going on. Friends and I griped our machines were down about every day. Person…

Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted. 1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle

I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here and there with him not having to do any extra work.

So, sysadmin was thanking me for helping him deal with machines that were inexplicably always crashing "because Acer machines are garbage." You feel more or less conflicted now? :P

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#52

Post by protomyth »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #51
protomyth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted. 1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle

I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here a…

Sadly, these days, the Acer machines are the least problematic of the machines (looking at you H "100 hard drive failures out of 120 machines" P) I have to deal with.

[edit] I feel about the same, as a system admin, I get bit in the /\$$ way too often by good intentions. I hear they pave a road with them (I think I worked there).

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#53

Post by Jtsummers »

atomic_lock wrote: post #18
Longhanks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is known in the jailbreak scene as someone who cannot stay serious - he's always involved in some kind of drama. If I recall correctly, the pangu dev team attended some of his sessions about iOS hacking and used this knowledge to create a publicly available jailbreak tool. He then started to rant about how they "stole" his technologies on twitter (see for example https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/481020166483238912…

The problem at the time was that they had used his bug that he gave away only for training purposes to the people attending his class. After the first release, pangu replaced his bug by one of theirs (and both bugs were fixed by apple in a subsequent iOS release.) He probably had to spend some time finding a new bug to use in his classes so it's understandable to be pissed.

How do you own a bug? Was the bug something in iOS? Wouldn't that be Apple's bug?

A sibling post said they took his code. That's a fair complaint, was it clear when they saw it that it was not code that they could reuse?

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#54

Post by mzs »

Aissen wrote: post #6

Tweet has been deleted: https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/738258436161449984 I deleted the tweet with the picture of the sandbox because people start hyping it up without linking the clarification. And the "clarification" tweet: https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/738084828202053633 For those late to the party: the sandbox bypass exception for Blizzard only affects the access() family of syscalls - probably harmless Edit…

0xBuLL of 0xa bytes, dev's feelings come through loud and clear here.

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#55

Post by MBCook »

protomyth wrote: post #42
mikeash wrote: post #38

Horribly misleading title here. Blizzard is exempt from one tiny piece of the sandbox, namely the sandboxing around access(). Which is nearly irrelevant.

Why does Blizzard need an exception while the rest of us have to deal with it as is? Exceptions to rules mean the rules are broken.

According to tips John Gruber got Blizzard had a bug in one of their updaters that would crash due to the sandbox. Apple put in a check to allow the call the updater was making to succeed, but didn't actually grant any access that the updater didn't have before.

Apple shipped an update to the sandbox and included a small, harmless fix to avoid issues in popular 3rd party software. Microsoft does this all the time.

Also according to those same birdies, the Blizzard fixed the bug a while ago so the 'exemption' may be removed soon as it's no longer necessary.

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#56

Post by JoachimSchipper »

mzs wrote: post #54
Aissen wrote: post #6

Tweet has been deleted: https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/738258436161449984 I deleted the tweet with the picture of the sandbox because people start hyping it up without linking the clarification. And the "clarification" tweet: https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/738084828202053633 For those late to the party: the sandbox bypass exception for Blizzard only affects the access() family of syscalls - probably harmless Edit…

0xBuLL of 0xa bytes, dev's feelings come through loud and clear here.

You're looking at the output of a disassembler, not at the original source code. It probably reads something boring like sizeof(Identifier) in the original.

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#57

Post by briane80 »

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #33
gutigen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Steam games are favourite attack vector of NSA, they love exploiting Steam games on sysadmin machines. https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-...

No Sysadmin shoud be playing games on the systems he/she uses for admin work.

I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story of a developer who had been playing Doom installed on a server.

The sysadm caught him playing it and promptly unistalled the game.

However the important business application hosted on the server then stopped working and no one could figure out why.

Nothing would work... even after lots of debugging, error log analysis and redeploying.

The developer suggested installing Doom again and lo and behold, the application started working.

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#58

Post by reymus »

chillacy wrote: post #2

I recall a story of how the windows 95 team (or the like) was crazy dedicated to backwards compatibility, so they had a check to see if the user was running Roller Coaster Tycoon and if so, disabled virtual memory so the game would run. Though I'd like to know more details, like: * Why does blizzard need to run in the sandbox on Mac OS X? The app sandbox is opt-in (though required for App Store apps) * Can anyone set…

Here's the story Joel Spolsky wrote some time ago[1]:

> Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#59

Post by LeifCarrotson »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #56
mzs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0xBuLL of 0xa bytes, dev's feelings come through loud and clear here.

You're looking at the output of a disassembler, not at the original source code. It probably reads something boring like sizeof(Identifier) in the original.

That's exactly what it is. The third parameter to memcmp is the length of the buffers to be compared - "G847MC6JZ5", the string being compared, has a length of 11 characters (including the null terminator, which is a little odd). 11 is B in hex, and is stored as an unsigned Long Long, so the representation in the disassembler is 0xBuLL.

And that string is the Blizzard identifier: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/bdfd2017fb776b52a4604928e...

Re: Blizzard Exempt from iOS and MacOS Security Sandbox

#60

Post by st3v3r »

protomyth wrote: post #42
mikeash wrote: post #38

Horribly misleading title here. Blizzard is exempt from one tiny piece of the sandbox, namely the sandboxing around access(). Which is nearly irrelevant.

Why does Blizzard need an exception while the rest of us have to deal with it as is? Exceptions to rules mean the rules are broken.

They're Blizzard. They're bigger than you. It's like all those exceptions that Microsoft made in Windows for different legacy software programs.
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