iService: Detecting and Evaluating the Impact of Confused Deputy Problem in AppleOS

Abstract

Confused deputy problem is a specific type of privilege escalation. It happens when a program tricks another more privileged one into misusing its authority. On AppleOS, system services are adopted to perform privileged operations when receiving inter-process communication (IPC) request from a user process. The confused deputy vulnerabilities may result if system services overlook the checking of IPC input. Unfortunately, it is tough to identify such vulnerabilities, which requires to understand the closed-source system services and private frameworks of the complex AppleOS by unraveling the dependencies in binaries.