Inter-Process Communication: XPC Services T1559.003
Tactic: Execution
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 C API or the high level NSXPCConnection API 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.
Events covered
1 catalog event is tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| ESF | exec | Process Execution |
Authoring guide
These 4 rules share fields, values, and exclusions.
Fields filtered most (12 distinct)
These fields appear most often in rule filters.
Top indicator values (34 distinct)
These values appear most often in rule predicates.
Exclusions (27 distinct)
These values appear most often in top-level exclusions.
Rules under this technique
These vendors publish rules tagged with this technique.
Platform: macOS
Domain: Endpoint