Techniques › T1559 › T1559.003
T1559.003 XPC Services
execution — macOS · attack.mitre.org · JSON
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MITRE detection strategy
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analytics
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Sigma rules tagged attack.t1559.003
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KEV CVEs mapped here
<p>Adversaries can provide malicious content to an XPC service daemon for local code execution. macOS uses XPC services for basic inter-process communication between various processes, such as between the XPC Service daemon and third-party application privileged helper tools. Applications can send messages to the XPC Service daemon, which runs as root, using the low-level XPC Service <code>C API</code> or the high level <code>NSXPCConnection API</code> in order to handle tasks that require elevated privileges (such as network connections). Applications are responsible for providing the protocol definition which serves as a blueprint of the XPC services. Developers typically use XPC Services to provide applications stability and privilege separation between the application client and the daemon.</p><p>Adversaries can abuse XPC services to execute malicious content. Requests for malicious execution can be passed through the application's XPC Services handler. This may also include identifying and abusing improper XPC client validation and/or poor sanitization of input parameters to conduct Exploitation for Privilege Escalation.</p>
KEV CVEs mapped to this technique · CTID Mappings Explorer
None. No KEV entry in the public mapping names this technique. Given that 74.7% of KEV has no mapping at all, this says more about the mapping than about the technique.
Detection strategy · ATT&CK Enterprise v19.2
- DET0335 Detect Abuse of XPC Services (T1559.003) v1.0
AN0948 macOSDetects anomalous use of macOS XPC services for code execution. Monitors for processes invoking privileged XPC daemons with abnormal parameters, unexpected binaries communicating over NSXPCConnection, or helper tools executing code outside of their expected parent process lineage. Correlates process access attempts to system-level daemons, privilege escalations via XPC misconfigurations, and injection of malicious payloads through inter-process communication.macos:unifiedlog
Unexpected NSXPCConnection calls by non-Apple-signed or abnormal binaries→ DC0035 Process Accessmacos:unifiedlogexecve: Helper tools invoked through XPC executing unexpected binaries→ DC0032 Process Creationmacos:unifiedlogXPC messages requesting privileged actions from untrusted or unsigned clients→ DC0048 Named Pipe MetadataTunable:AllowedXPCClientsTimeWindowUnsignedBinaryAlertLevel
Sigma rules · SigmaHQ da9bb07d64, tag attack.t1559.003
No Sigma rule carries this tag. MITRE publishes a detection strategy above, so the behaviour is specified; what is missing is public detection content.
Rules tagged at the parent level (attack.t1559) 1
These target the parent technique, not this sub-technique specifically. Listed for completeness, not counted as coverage.
Author: Florian Roth (Nextron Systems)
· 2020-11-26 (modified 2021-11-27) · logsource: product=windows category=process_creation · 58bf96d9-ff5f-44bd-8dcc-1c4f79bf3a27
Detects Trickbot malware process tree pattern in which "rundll32.exe" is a parent of "wermgr.exe"