It's funny how in the past a server uptime used to be a kind of badge of honor, while now a computer running for more than a week is a massive security risk.
I've had to be on top of updating everything constantly lately.
Claude and Anthropic is mentioned, but not Mythos, I'm guessing this would mean then this was found outside of the whole Mythos thing, or would there be any reason for them not to mention it, if it was involved?
Where all of this is going? Will there be a dedicated servers running coding agents that iterate throught codebases for each company to find vulnerabilities 24/7?
It's just another tool in the belt. Someone will say that's cheaper than rewriting in safe rust or whatever. (Apple must have a bunch of 1980s code written to 1980s standards. But that is their moneymaker.)
For many years my go-to plan has been to stay one point release behind apple's releases, especially the .0 releases -- but, times change. Last night I pushed the button for 26.5, thinking about the Glasswing/Mythos reporting. Seems like staying on bleeding edge is going to be the name of the game.
I wonder if this will change general dynamics -- feels like LTS releases could become even more important, at the same time having reduced maintenance costs since you can have some agentic help on backporting.
Staying one point release behind is weird isn’t it? I get staying a major release behind, Apple’s x.0 releases are often pretty rough so it might be worth staying on x-1 for a while. But point releases mostly just fix the stuff they broke in the major release.. Would you really upgrade from 18.5 or whatever to 26.0 when Apple releases 26.1?
Point releases for macOS can be pretty large over the past several years - what often makes sense is waiting a few weeks to upgrade in case there's a .1 patch.
e.g. macOS 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 15.4, 15.6 and 15.7 all had .1 patches within a few weeks of release.
> The affected releases include iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, and macOS Tahoe 26.5.
Where does this quote come from? I can't see it in https://support.apple.com/en-us/127115, the article link at time of writing. It mentions CVE-2026-28952, but we're forced to guess why. I'd take the reference to mean that this issue is fixed, but I'm just some internet rando, so what the hell do I know?
If I do a google search for "CVE-2026-28952", it points me to various pages. Here's one, for example: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-28952 - which is a bit more explicit, though of course this is not from the horse's mouth:
> This issue is fixed in iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, macOS Tahoe 26.5
CVE-2026-28952 is about an integer overflow due to lack of input validation. I wonder what makes such vulnerability difficult to discover by traditional SAST tools?
The tools are expensive. One of the major players in the market have really expensive licensing fees. Then the developers all need to be trained on how to use the tools and understand the results. It’s not something they teach effectively in schools.
Software engineering is still kind of new overall.
Which tool specifically are you thinking of that might have found this but wasn't run because of it's very high licensing fees? I work in this field, I'll be familiar with it.
Question was about high licensing fees and which tools I was referring to
I’m not claiming Defensics or OpenText DAST tools are magical “find all kernel vulns” buttons
My point is more that mature fuzzing ecosystems already existed before the recent AI-driven approaches. Protocol fuzzers, syscall fuzzers, coverage-guided fuzzers, sanitizers, dynamic analysis, etc. have all historically found serious kernel bugs
Apple has a massive information security organization that has pretty intense resources at their disposal.
It seems borderline impossible that there's a tool that they feel would be beneficial but that they're classed out of using by license costs or by staff proficiency.
I wonder how well Apple has deployed these tools internally for security research.
Since mid-April Chrome showed 302 vulnerabilities patched, 225 of them found by Google. Same period last year was 19 vulnerabilities. They've also become more transparent recently, disclosing vulnerabilities found internally, not just externally (which Apple still doesn't appear to do). From the outside, it's hard to tell if Apple has deployed this tooling as much as Google.
What's your thinking on this? From my perspective Apple security go pretty hard. They have a strong track record of being able to ship architectural mitigations like PACs / MIE / Exclaves first. I guess because Apple control the stack from silicon to userspace.
My thinking was in a historical context, and for their desktop OS's. I know they've been pretty on top of things with iPhones, and MacOS has become a lot better, but for the longest time MacOS was pretty lacking, coasting very much on promoting how much PCs have viruses and macs didn't, which was a marketshare thing more than a security thing. I don't think they got ASLR until later than pretty much everyone else, for example.
They've improved a lot, especially their phones, but I'd still never consider them a company that has a really strong focus on security.
That's a really strange claim given AS was a refinement of a technology other manufacturers have yet to surpass in the ten years since the T1 chip came out.
To this day nobody else ties their SMC, biometric auth, and HSM together as tightly and well as the T1 did. AS was further advancement of that.
Furthermore, Apple protects users against the legal changes that have allowed law enforcement to physically force someone to provide biometric credentials. By default MS just provides biometric auth to make it easier to log in to your system.
iOS always had a strong focus on security but if you take the time period say 2005 - 2015 it did not seem like there was much investment in macOS security at Apple. I am talking about stuff like exploit mitigations and relatively low hanging LPEs. Features like (full) ASLR / SIP / kext controls were added well after competitors.
They were not "coasting" on anything. Everything about OS X has always been designed to protect users from the stuff Apple hasn't caught yet, because they know they can't always catch it first - and Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.
Didn’t Microsoft pioneer the privilege escalation prompts in Vista in 2007? It was a joke at the time how little things would hijack the entire screen to allow seemingly mundane things. I didn’t ever use Vista personally or professionally, but macOS has become pretty bad with basically the same model.
Microsoft's Secure Desktop feature is actually incredibly well designed, and provides strong protect against fraudulent prompts or prompt interception attacks.
It is the default (unless they changed it in the last 2 years or so). I know for a fact that my PC and Laptop don't ask for my password and I know for a fact that I reinstalled Windows on my laptop less than 2 years ago and changed nothing regarding the UAC prompt (the closest that is even remotely close is enabling sudo in the settings).
IMHO, both are a mode of progressively penalizing developers as a mode of API obsoletion. It doesn't feel like the opportunity to fix a degradation of user experience really motivated app developers in either case.
The difference is Apple is much more likely to progressively make these legacy feature compatibility more difficult for users to configure over time, and to remove them eventually.
Yeah, they were. Virus writers were not targeting them as a platform because why develop for 10% marketshare when you can target 90% for free. It just wasn't worth it to target as a platform. So there was some level of protection due to lack of interest in distributed attacks, but the OS had very little protection against targeted attacks.
> Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
What an absurd claim. Apple trails behind, it never leads in this space. Windows 7 had numerous protections that had become standards that Apple still lacked when Windows 10 came out.
Recently there was an Anki vulnerability that gave any website access to any local files. On Windows or Linux this would be deadly. On macOS, Anki can't access my desktop or documents or Chrome storage or password manager storage. I think Apple's been smart about which security features it prioritizes.
> I guess because Apple control the stack from silicon to userspace.
People always say this but there is no real relationship there. When hardware vendors add security technologies to the hardware, the major third party operating systems add support to use it pretty much immediately, and in many cases before the hardware even ships because the hardware vendor publishes the documentation ahead of time.
Try to name something where Apple was the first to support something (by a non-trivial amount of time) not because they were the first to add hardware support but because they released the combination of hardware and software in the time between when e.g. Intel or Qualcomm added hardware support and when Linux or Windows added software support to use it.
I think Apple became much better at security in recent years. One example which I think is indicative of their approach to security - they bothered to add a hardware microphone disconnect when a macbook is closed. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/...
I am part of Apple's SEAR (Security Engineering and Architecture) organization and can’t attest that we have been using Anthropic models, including, but not limited to, Mythos, as part of our participation in Project Glassing and previous private partnerships with different frontier AI labs for years. We simply don’t talk about it because there’s no benefit to talk about it, and also NDA’s, but mostly because there’s no benefit to talk about it other than to satiate people’s curiosity about what we do or don’t do internally.
The heavily ironic implication is that they're under NDA, so they can't attest to it, while more or less attesting it. Senator, I cannot confirm or deny that we definitely do this.
This could also be an unofficial-official way for Apple to "leak" that yes, they do this--which is on brand for how Apple handles "rumors" etc.
When the CIA representative says "I can neither confirm nor deny" it generally means the atrocities of which the agency has been accused did, in fact, take place.
When I worked in the civil service we were trained to use that phrase to any query, no matter how innocuous (unless we had permission to give more info).
You may think that not issuing a categorical denial is suspicious, but generally speaking you cannot infer any information from that response. If it was only used when really bad things might have happened, maybe you could infer more.
Yeah I’m honestly not sure why macOS updates seem to be so huge. Often gigabytes. Do they actually have thousands of changes, so they basically ship out new versions of almost all system libraries? Or is it that they don’t have good diffing in place? Or is it a BSD thing where you basically ship everyone at once since it’s all sort of “one version” of the base system?
> But aren't they able to do incremental builds and separated x64/arm64?
During the PowerPC to Intel transition, they did stuff like that; perhaps at their current scale, there's reasons why they don't.
Supporting both architectures enables a macOS install to boot an Intel Mac or an Apple Silicon Mac, which is useful in a dual-architecture environment.
It's easy to check for dual architecture support; just use the file command:
I haven't been able to update my iPhone in months because it just does not have enough room available to download the update. I just checked now and it needs 13.2 GB free to be able to update to iOS 26.5 (from 26.3). On a 64gb device!
It just seems like massive software development malpractice to tie together critical operating system updates with whatever else they've bundled.
I have a 32 GB iPad, I think it's the year 2020 model. The OS alone uses 19 GB ("iPadOS" 12.3 GB + "System Data" 6.4 GB) so yeah, not much chance doing any OTA updates on that one with the requirement of 13+ GB free.
Maybe some day the fruit company with all their billions will be able to innovate a solution for deploying for example browser fixes so that they can be installed without requiring tens of gigabytes of free storage on the device. Meanwhile, we're stuck using a computer and iTunes for that.
It’s insane. It’s always an ordeal. They put so little storage on these phones that 20% of it is for iOS/system already. On top of that requiring 13-15 GB for an update is a huge pain.
when multiple independent parties are simultaneously tripping over different holes in the same kernel, that's not bad luck, that's a systemic attack surface problem
fosterfriends | 18 hours ago
Impact: An app may be able to cause unexpected system termination
Description: An integer overflow was addressed with improved input validation.
CVE-2026-28952: Calif.io in collaboration with Claude and Anthropic Research
Gigachad | 18 hours ago
I've had to be on top of updating everything constantly lately.
embedding-shape | 17 hours ago
sigmar | 17 hours ago
>Our engineers, working together with Mythos Preview, built a working exploit in five days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219
fl1pper | 17 hours ago
vessenes | 17 hours ago
Aurornis | 17 hours ago
1000 different companies will be pitching your CTO their proprietary vulnerability scanning harness as the most cost effective.
colejohnson66 | 17 hours ago
flomo | 12 hours ago
jeffbee | 15 hours ago
0123456789ABCDE | 11 hours ago
google has been running ClusterFuzz since ~2012, and naptime was announced in 2024 (https://projectzero.google/2024/06/project-naptime.html). they call it big sleep and codemender now.
openai announced aardvark last year, no they call it codex security.
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
sda2 | 17 hours ago
hedgehog | 17 hours ago
https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-28952
[OP] dragonsenseiguy | 17 hours ago
Sequoia also has security bugs :) https://support.apple.com/en-us/127116
vessenes | 17 hours ago
I wonder if this will change general dynamics -- feels like LTS releases could become even more important, at the same time having reduced maintenance costs since you can have some agentic help on backporting.
samtheprogram | 16 hours ago
baq | 14 hours ago
[OP] dragonsenseiguy | 16 hours ago
mort96 | 16 hours ago
Marsymars | 15 hours ago
e.g. macOS 15.0, 15.1, 15.3, 15.4, 15.6 and 15.7 all had .1 patches within a few weeks of release.
neuronexmachina | 17 hours ago
* https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-28952
* https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-28942
Aurornis | 17 hours ago
> The affected releases include iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, and macOS Tahoe 26.5.
I’ve already seen a lot of people self-congratulating for not updating to Tahoe but this isn’t exclusive to Tahoe.
[OP] dragonsenseiguy | 17 hours ago
tom_ | 15 hours ago
Where does this quote come from? I can't see it in https://support.apple.com/en-us/127115, the article link at time of writing. It mentions CVE-2026-28952, but we're forced to guess why. I'd take the reference to mean that this issue is fixed, but I'm just some internet rando, so what the hell do I know?
If I do a google search for "CVE-2026-28952", it points me to various pages. Here's one, for example: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-28952 - which is a bit more explicit, though of course this is not from the horse's mouth:
> This issue is fixed in iOS 18.7.9 and iPadOS 18.7.9, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, macOS Tahoe 26.5
three_burgers | 17 hours ago
firesteelrain | 16 hours ago
Assuming Apple has deployed all of these and have invested in the labor/training on how to properly use them.
tptacek | 13 hours ago
kimixa | 10 hours ago
A lot of these issues would be highlighted by "legacy" (pre-AI) analysis tools. The issue is that they weren't being run.
tptacek | 5 hours ago
Isn't the simpler explanation that they weren't just a tool run?
firesteelrain | 4 hours ago
Software engineering is still kind of new overall.
tptacek | 3 hours ago
firesteelrain | an hour ago
https://www.blackduck.com/fuzz-testing.html
OpenText products
https://www.opentext.com/products/dynamic-application-securi...
I won’t say how much they are here but they are very expensive.
tptacek | an hour ago
firesteelrain | 24 minutes ago
I’m not claiming Defensics or OpenText DAST tools are magical “find all kernel vulns” buttons
My point is more that mature fuzzing ecosystems already existed before the recent AI-driven approaches. Protocol fuzzers, syscall fuzzers, coverage-guided fuzzers, sanitizers, dynamic analysis, etc. have all historically found serious kernel bugs
akerl_ | 2 hours ago
It seems borderline impossible that there's a tool that they feel would be beneficial but that they're classed out of using by license costs or by staff proficiency.
firesteelrain | an hour ago
Someone | 4 hours ago
- looking at components in isolation, not realizing that a component could receive untrusted input
- looking at the entire system, but not in a configuration that made the CVE possible
- having to be extremely lucky to find the issue through fuzzing, and Apple not hitting that jackpot
- having found the issue in testing, but incompletely/incorrectly fixing it
- mostly focusing testing on other components because this one’s code didn’t change and hadn’t seen issues in years
I don’t think we have enough info to know which (or something entirely different) it is.
pbgcp2026 | 10 hours ago
ZPrimed | 17 hours ago
[OP] dragonsenseiguy | 16 hours ago
awestroke | 11 hours ago
dwaite | 9 hours ago
concinds | 17 hours ago
Since mid-April Chrome showed 302 vulnerabilities patched, 225 of them found by Google. Same period last year was 19 vulnerabilities. They've also become more transparent recently, disclosing vulnerabilities found internally, not just externally (which Apple still doesn't appear to do). From the outside, it's hard to tell if Apple has deployed this tooling as much as Google.
JCattheATM | 16 hours ago
xyzzy123 | 15 hours ago
JCattheATM | 15 hours ago
They've improved a lot, especially their phones, but I'd still never consider them a company that has a really strong focus on security.
xyzzy123 | 14 hours ago
KennyBlanken | 13 hours ago
To this day nobody else ties their SMC, biometric auth, and HSM together as tightly and well as the T1 did. AS was further advancement of that.
Furthermore, Apple protects users against the legal changes that have allowed law enforcement to physically force someone to provide biometric credentials. By default MS just provides biometric auth to make it easier to log in to your system.
xyzzy123 | 10 hours ago
KennyBlanken | 13 hours ago
That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.
jonhohle | 13 hours ago
KennyBlanken | 12 hours ago
Microsoft's implementation was (twenty years later still is) a joke because it prompted users to hit enter or click a button.
JCattheATM | 10 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
Ironically Apple just recently added the same simpified approach.
NekkoDroid | 4 hours ago
It is the default (unless they changed it in the last 2 years or so). I know for a fact that my PC and Laptop don't ask for my password and I know for a fact that I reinstalled Windows on my laptop less than 2 years ago and changed nothing regarding the UAC prompt (the closest that is even remotely close is enabling sudo in the settings).
pjmlp | 4 hours ago
kilpikaarna | 10 hours ago
dwaite | 10 hours ago
The difference is Apple is much more likely to progressively make these legacy feature compatibility more difficult for users to configure over time, and to remove them eventually.
JCattheATM | 10 hours ago
Yeah, they were. Virus writers were not targeting them as a platform because why develop for 10% marketshare when you can target 90% for free. It just wasn't worth it to target as a platform. So there was some level of protection due to lack of interest in distributed attacks, but the OS had very little protection against targeted attacks.
> Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
What an absurd claim. Apple trails behind, it never leads in this space. Windows 7 had numerous protections that had become standards that Apple still lacked when Windows 10 came out.
concinds | 9 hours ago
Recently there was an Anki vulnerability that gave any website access to any local files. On Windows or Linux this would be deadly. On macOS, Anki can't access my desktop or documents or Chrome storage or password manager storage. I think Apple's been smart about which security features it prioritizes.
dwaite | 10 hours ago
For another example: macOS integrated antivirus in 2009, while Windows did so in 2012.
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
AnthonyMouse | 13 hours ago
People always say this but there is no real relationship there. When hardware vendors add security technologies to the hardware, the major third party operating systems add support to use it pretty much immediately, and in many cases before the hardware even ships because the hardware vendor publishes the documentation ahead of time.
Try to name something where Apple was the first to support something (by a non-trivial amount of time) not because they were the first to add hardware support but because they released the combination of hardware and software in the time between when e.g. Intel or Qualcomm added hardware support and when Linux or Windows added software support to use it.
krisbolton | 11 hours ago
guessmyname | 14 hours ago
riffraff | 13 hours ago
Typo, or I am just misreading?
isomorphic | 12 hours ago
This could also be an unofficial-official way for Apple to "leak" that yes, they do this--which is on brand for how Apple handles "rumors" etc.
qsxfthnkp2322 | 10 hours ago
bitwize | 9 hours ago
MattPalmer1086 | 8 hours ago
You may think that not issuing a categorical denial is suspicious, but generally speaking you cannot infer any information from that response. If it was only used when really bad things might have happened, maybe you could infer more.
lapcat | 5 hours ago
That there's no benefit to talking with the public is something that only Apple could believe.
Openness and honesty create trust. Secrecy creates distrust.
[OP] dragonsenseiguy | 16 hours ago
jshier | 16 hours ago
atonse | 15 hours ago
alwillis | 14 hours ago
An update to macOS 26.5 contains all the necessary code to update a Mac from 26.0 to 26.5 for both x86_64 and arm64 architectures.
qsxfthnkp2322 | 10 hours ago
atonse | an hour ago
They know which OS version is requesting an update, at least the version number part.
alwillis | an hour ago
During the PowerPC to Intel transition, they did stuff like that; perhaps at their current scale, there's reasons why they don't.
Supporting both architectures enables a macOS install to boot an Intel Mac or an Apple Silicon Mac, which is useful in a dual-architecture environment.
It's easy to check for dual architecture support; just use the file command:
cryptbe | 15 hours ago
For the record, this bug has nothing to do with our recent MIE attack [1] [2], which exploited two different kernel bugs. Our bugs are not fixed yet.
[1] https://blog.calif.io/p/first-public-kernel-memory-corruptio...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219
0123456789ABCDE | 12 hours ago
vulnerabilities have already been fixed, and the system update was pushed 2026/05/11 †
> This document describes the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.5.
think: this is what we included with the tahoe 26.5 update 2 weeks ago
thanks ZPrimed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273889)
† https://support.apple.com/en-us/122868
maximilianburke | 15 hours ago
It just seems like massive software development malpractice to tie together critical operating system updates with whatever else they've bundled.
zx8080 | 13 hours ago
Alifatisk | 11 hours ago
greatgib | 11 hours ago
jonhohle | 13 hours ago
ttkari | 11 hours ago
Maybe some day the fruit company with all their billions will be able to innovate a solution for deploying for example browser fixes so that they can be installed without requiring tens of gigabytes of free storage on the device. Meanwhile, we're stuck using a computer and iTunes for that.
dyauspitr | 10 hours ago
immanuwell | 13 hours ago
pjmlp | 13 hours ago
Large majority of CVEs in the update are related to memory corruption, out of bounds and use after free.
Naturally the logic and wrong permissions ones would happen regardless of the language.
sitkack | 11 hours ago
pjmlp | 11 hours ago