Microsoft says a vulnerability it discovered in a core macOS security feature, Gatekeeper, could have allowed attackers to compromise vulnerable Macs with malware.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-42821, was first uncovered by Microsoft principal security researcher Jonathan Bar Or, and dubbed the “Achilles” vulnerability. Bar Or said the bug could allow malware to skirt Gatekeeper’s protections on macOS.
First introduced in 2012, Gatekeeper is a security feature designed to allow only trusted software to run on macOS. The feature automatically verifies that all apps downloaded from the internet are from identified developers who have been “notarized” by Apple, and whose apps are known to be free of malicious content.
Microsoft’s Bar Or explained in a blog post that macOS adds a “quarantine” attribute to apps and files that have been downloaded from a web b …
