Tuesday, August 21, 2012 10:14 AM Hacker News
By Ash Furrow (http://ashfurrow.com/)
Sam Soffes tweeted an interesting link this morning detailing how to use low-level C memory profiling techniques to get at the unencrypted OAuth headers used by OS X apps. It's an interesting approach and, if you're an OS X or iOS developer, should give you some pause to think about the kinds of sensitive information you store in heap memory. Not sensitive to your users, but sensitive to you.
The author of the post details how there isn't really a way to prevent these sorts of attacks, which is true. However, getting an unencrypted OAuth header with your consumer key isn't difficult; it's easily accessible by a malicious user using an HTTPS proxy. You still don't have the consumer secret, the bit of information required to impersonate an app. This secret is still probably floating around your app in non-static memory and will be freed at some point, so this attack can get to it, along wit