Recent posts on Robert Sesek
Many bytes have been spilled the past few years over macOS’s declining software quality. This piece recounts an aspect of my own experience with this. I have been using Time Machine to backup and restore files since Apple introduced the feature back in 2007 with OS X Leopard. The space-age UI was both cool and convenient for retrieving files. But more importantly, the simplicity of hourly…
Over the past year I’ve been moving a lot of my personal infrastructure to connect via Tailscale . This has let me reduce the Internet-accessible attack surface on some of these hosts, in some cases removing all public presence. Many of these hosts serve internal websites (like FreshRSS ), for which I want a TLS certificate. Previously I would use the ACME HTTP-01 challenge type, where you…
Welcome to the next installment of infrequent deep dives into XNU, the kernel that powers Apple’s operating systems. In this post, I will walk through the Mach voucher subsystem from a software engineering perspective. Ian Beer discusses the Mach voucher system from an exploitation perspective in this post . References herein are from xnu-8020.140.41 and libdispatch-1325.120.2 . Vouchers are…
Digitally signing PDFs for documents is becoming increasingly commonplace for official documents. This post will look at three Mac apps for digitally signing PDFs with signature images. It is important to note that these signatures do not cryptographically ensure the integrity of the document; rather, they are used to replicate a “wet ink” signature. If you want true verification of a…
Thanks to a FOIA request by Joseph Durso, pointed out to me by @manhack , there is an updated public copy of the Intelligence Community - Markings System Register and Manual that I last wrote about in 2014 . In this post, I’ll analyze the major changes compared to the 2013 version of the Manual. The FOIA request was submitted in December 2019 and received in July 2021, and the responsive…
One of the most important tools I use every day is Todoist . I’ve used several task list products, but none have stuck as well as Todoist. My favorite feature is the ability to create custom filters to display your tasks, which are the views I use most often. But in order for those filters to be effective, I rely on a larger system. I view task management systems as having two primary…
When working on software, it is sometimes necessary to debug very early in a program’s lifecycle (e.g., before the first line of main() when the dynamic loader is running). Often times this is accomplished by loading the target binary into a debugger and running it directly. However there are other times where this is not possible, such as when an intermediate process is responsible for…
Overview BezelServices is a subsystem on Mac OS X that acts as a glue layer between HID device drivers in the kernel, preferences that influence the behavior of those devices stored in CFPreferences, and a small UI surface that provides feedback about the state of the devices. Examples of devices that make use of BezelServices are MagicTrackpad, Bluetooth keyboards, volume and screen brightness…
Background Today I needed to securely wipe an old laptop in preparation for computer recycling. The Mac Book Pro was running 10.6, so it had no built-in recovery partition. I did have another Mac running 10.11 and a spare SD Card laying around. So I decided to build a bootable recovery SD Card. It takes just a few minutes to do. Instructions First, get a sense of what you’re working with by…
This article publishes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s index of Intelligence Community Directives, which I requested under the FOIA. As outlined in ICD 101 , the Directives establish policies, procedures, and standards to be followed all elements of the Intelligence Community. These directives can be enacted with additional guidance laid out in Intelligence Community…
This page contains a combined view of NSA’s Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment lists from 2003 and 2013 . Rows in blue are only present in the 2003 version, whereas rows in red are only present in the 2013 version. Non-colored rows are present in both versions. The two versions of the document differ considerably: the 2003 version of the document not only lists the…
The NSA TURBULENCE program was first revealed in 2007 by the Baltimore Sun for being over-budget and poorly-managed 1 2 . Many documents from the Snowden trove from the past two years reference parts of this program, but no coherent story or overview of how these programs operate together has been described. This is an attempt to do so, using leaked and declassified documents. At the time the Sun…
When a recent beach vacation trip got rained out, we had to pass the time with board games. We stumbled upon a variant of Pictionary called Ultimate Pictionary , which we tweaked to create “Stupid Wizard”. The game is a kind of visual telephone . The Materials All you need to play Stupid Wizard is a group of at least three people, paper with both sides blank, and pens. Specifically, I…
After I posted the CAPCO v6 last month, some new information has come up regarding a few of the disclosed SCIs, specifically ENDSEAL. Unredacted Markings System Manual Last week, the ODNI published an even newer version of the Intelligence Community Markings System: Register and Manual , dated December 2013. This is dated only 10 months later than the version that was released to me via FOIA, but…
Back in August 2013, I sent a FOIA request to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, requesting the latest version of the Intelligence Community Authorized Classification and Control Markings Manual (also referred to as the CAPCO manual, for the office that maintains it) and some other documents. The following is an analysis of the documents that were furnished in response to my…