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Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

#3
post #2

Wonder what this means in the grand scheme of things. Will Apple dump Broadcom and go with Qualcomm or attempt to fix Broadcom's broken driver. I say broken as I've yet to see good code come from Broadcom.

This is a bug that was already fixed. It means nothing in the grand scheme.

In the current grand scheme, Apple and Qualcomm are also currently suing each other and I'm pretty sure part of that is Apple withholding billions in payments.

Re: Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

#4
Interestingly this was not part of the original iOS11 security announcement: http://web.archive.org/web/20170919182359/https://support.ap... and (a mail to apple-security which is no longer archived at https://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2017/Sep/... )

But instead published after the fact as an additional update: https://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2017/Sep/... and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208112

Why delay the announcement? And why remove the original "APPLE-SA-2017-09-19-1 iOS 11" with "Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 -0700" from the apple-security email archive?

Also, are Macbooks vulnerable to the same bug until next monday when macOS 10.13 drops?

Also, there are about 6 other similar issues recently posted to Google Project Zero: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?can=1&q...

Re: Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

#7

Is this going to be fixed in iOS 10? Some users have apps which will not work with iOS 11, so cannot immediately upgrade.

Highly unlikely, I don't think Apple has ever released multiple branches of updates for any device. The closest is perhaps iOS 6.1.6, a fix for the fatal "gotofail" SSL vulnerability, which was pushed out to devices stuck on iOS 6.x, but if your device was eligible for iOS7 then iOS7(.0.6) was what you would get.

That's also the only time I can remember security updates being pushed after a device model being end-of-life'd.

Re: Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

#8
post #2

Wonder what this means in the grand scheme of things. Will Apple dump Broadcom and go with Qualcomm or attempt to fix Broadcom's broken driver. I say broken as I've yet to see good code come from Broadcom.

This isn't even in Broadcom code.

Maybe not this time, but they have a history of fatal firmware bugs that could compromise the host system - such as http://boosterok.com/blog/broadpwn2/

Re: Apple: Heap Overflow in AppleBCMWLANCore Driver

#9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even in Broadcom code.

Maybe not this time, but they have a history of fatal firmware bugs that could compromise the host system - such as http://boosterok.com/blog/broadpwn2/

For what it's worth, Broadcom's market share in attractive heavy-firmware wifi adapters is pretty high. They could just be an exploit magnet.
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