I never checked that one personally though.' While one can also access restricted folders on a Mac by SSH-ing into localhost to list the folder (as detailed in a tweet by boB Rudis), Johnson told BleepingComputer that the flaw he found is based on another method: 'I've heard about that bypass before, but I thought it was fixed in a previous Mojave update. So the bypass is nothing complex, it just requires Mac developer knowledge.'

I was using a particular API, which I won't name, and it occurred to me that I could use that API to read restricted folders. In an interview with BleepingComputer, the developer told us that 'I discovered the bug while I was working on my own app. It's important to mention that this privacy protection bypass is not exploitable using malicious sandboxed applications, but only with non-sandboxed or notarized ones, even though Mojave's privacy protections are designed to apply regardless of sandboxing. There are no permission dialogs, It Just Works.™ In this way, a malware app could secretly violate a user's privacy by examining their web browsing history.Ī specially crafted application designed to take advantage of this macOS issue would allow an attacker to snoop on the contents of a potential victim's browsing history. However, I've discovered a way to bypass these protections in Mojave and allow apps to look inside ~/Library/Safari without acquiring any permission from the system or from the user. Mojave provides special access to this folder for only a few apps, such as Finder.

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