Charlie Miller Hacks into MacBook Air in 2 Minutes

Charlie Miller, best known as one of the researchers who first hacked Apple’s iPhone last year, hacked into the MacBook Air this time in only two minutes at the CanSecWest security conference.

At the CanSecWest Conference’s PWN 2 OWN, which took part between March 26-28 in Vancouver BC Canada, computer experts were invited to break into any of three machines: a MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2, Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Vista SP1, and the Fujitsu U810 notebook running Ubuntu 7.10.

Miller, who works as an analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, hacked the MacBook Air in 2 minutes by visiting a Web site with exploit code he created. The code allowed him to take control of the computer through Apple’s Safari browser.

In his own words, he picked the Apple Inc operating system for a simple reason: ”It was the easiest one of the three.”

All of the updated security patches had been installed on the MacBook before hack attack took place.

“We sat down about three weeks ago and decided we wanted to throw our hats into the ring,” said Miller, referring to himself and ISE colleagues.

“It took us a couple of days to find something, then the rest of the week to work up an exploit and test it… It took us maybe a week altogether,” Miller said.

“We could have chosen any of those three but had to make a judgement call on which would be the easiest and decided it would be Leopard,” Miller said.

“Every time I look for [a flaw in Leopard] I find one. I can’t say the same for Linux or Windows. I found the iPhone bug a year ago and that was a Safari bug as well. I’ve also found other bugs in QuickTime.”

So how did he do it? In his own words: “Basically you type in something to the web browser and go to website that is controlled. In real life, you would get a link in an email and, if you clicked on it, that would be the same thing.”

Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement which means that the exploit will not be made public until Apple has been informed. At the time of posting, the other two machines remain intact.

“I use a MacBook all the time and that’s what I used in the contest to attack the MacBook Air. I like Macs. That’s the reason I went for it; it’s in my best interest for them to be as secure as possible,” said Miller.