Articles by Mathieu Farrell

This blog post dives into the most common classes of macOS Local Privilege Escalation vulnerabilities, from time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions and insecure XPC communications to a range of implementation and configuration oversights. We will explore how attackers can exploit these weaknesses to escalate privileges, and highlight real-world examples to illustrate recurring patterns.

This blog post dives into the most common classes of macOS Local Privilege Escalation vulnerabilities, from time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Conditions and insecure XPC communications to a range of implementation and configuration oversights. We will explore how attackers can exploit these weaknesses to escalate privileges, and highlight real-world examples to illustrate recurring patterns.

A technical exploration of Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in ControlPlane on macOS.

The following article explains how, during an audit, we examined Moodle (v4.4.3) and found ways of bypassing all the restrictions preventing SSRF vulnerabilities from being exploited.

A technical exploration of a trivial Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in CCleaner <= v1.18.30 on macOS.

In this series of articles we describe how, during an "assumed breach" security audit, we compromised multiple web applications on our client's network to carry out a watering hole attack by installing fake Single Sign-On pages on compromised servers. In our second episode we take a look at SOPlanning, a project management application that we encountered during the audit.

The following article describes how, during an "assumed breach" security audit, we compromised multiple web applications on our client's network in order to carry out a watering hole attack by installing fake Single Sign-On pages on the compromised servers. This article is the first of a two-part series and explains why it is not enough to just check for CVEs, and why we should dive deep into the code to look for new vulnerabilities in old code bases. We will take phpMyAdmin version 2.11.5 as an example, as this is the version we encountered during the audit.

The following article explains how during an audit we took a look at Apache Superset and found bypasses (by reading the PostgreSQL documentation) for the security measures implemented.

The following article explains how during a Purple Team engagement we were able to identify a vulnerability in Microsoft Teams on macOS allowing us to access a user's camera and microphone.

The following blogpost explains how during a Red Team engagement we were able to identify several vulnerabilities including Remote Code Executions in the latest version of Chamilo.