Described in the distributed notification class documentation, Apple states this class is a “ notification dispatch mechanism that enables the broadcast of notifications across task boundaries.“ OSX/macOS allows applications or system components to broadcast notifications “ across task boundaries.” Aptly termed “distributed notifications” such events are broadcast by means of the DistributedNotificationCenter class. In this post, we’re dealing with the latter, specifically side-stepping Apple’s sandbox constraints on “distributed notifications” in order to gain valuable insight into the environment outside the sandbox and monitor (some) private user and OS activities. Of course, any sandbox implementation will have its flaws, allowing malicious applications to either “escape” the sandbox completely, or while still in the sandbox, bypass some specific sandbox constraint. your pictures or downloads), capture keystrokes, or subvert the OS. For example, amongst other constraints, it cannot arbitrarily access user files (i.e. In short, within the constraints of a properly designed and implemented sandbox, an application is largely limited in a variety of ways.

Backgroundįrom a security and privacy point of view, sandboxes are an excellent idea.

This blog post dives more deeply into the technical details of the flaw.

This issue was originally disclosed (by yours truly) at Objective-See’s Mac Security Conference: “Objective by the Sea”. In this short blog post, we’ll detail a trivially exploitable privacy issue that despite Apple’s (rather feeble) attempts, allows sandboxed applications to surreptitiously spy on unsuspecting users.

Apple sandbox cloud