With a recent market cap of over $100 billion and the genericization of its name, the popularity of Zoom is undeniable. But what about its security? This imperative question is often quite personal, as who amongst us isn't jumping on weekly (daily?) Zoom calls? In this talk, we’ll explore Zoom’s macOS application to uncover several critical security flaws. Flaws, that provided a local unprivileged attacker a direct and reliable path to root. The first flaw, presents itself subtly in a core cryptographic validation routine, while the second is due to a nuanced trust issue between Zoom’s client and its privileged helper component. After detailing both root cause analysis and full exploitation of these flaws, we’ll end the talk by showing how such issues could be avoided …both by Zoom, but also in other macOS applications.

With a recent market cap of over $100 billion and the genericization of its name, the popularity of Zoom is undeniable. But what about its security? This imperative question is often quite personal, as who amongst us isn't jumping on weekly (daily?) Zoom calls? In this talk, we’ll explore Zoom’s macOS application to uncover several critical security flaws. Flaws, that provided a local unprivileged attacker a direct and reliable path to root. The first flaw, presents itself subtly in a core cryptographic validation routine, while the second is due to a nuanced trust issue between Zoom’s client and its privileged helper component. After detailing both root cause analysis and full exploitation of these flaws, we’ll end the talk by showing how such issues could be avoided …both by Zoom, but also in other macOS applications.