macOS Daemonology: Communicate with Daemons, Agents, and Helpers Through XPC

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

V. VashurkinmacOS Daemonologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7277-0_6

6. Privileged Helper

Volodymyr Vashurkin¹  

(1)

Dnipro, Ukraine

 

In this chapter, we’ll discuss special daemons, called privileged helpers, which are the legal and modern way to do privilege escalation in macOS.

You can also refer to the examples at Daemonology/3-PrivilegedHelper.

PrivilegedHelper Specifics

PrivilegedHelper looks very much like the regular daemon with the following attributes:

• System-wide

• Run as root

• Usually a single instance in the system

But PrivilegedHelper has some differences and limitations.

• It is installed and managed by a limited list of apps (declared in Info.plist). ...