Amazon calls this a feature in Alexa!
This has been disproven time and time again.
FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
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Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#62If I were Apple, I would be implementing a server side migration right now:
- if someone adds their own email or phone number again to a group chat, immediately terminate the call
As far as I know, this would mitigate the vulnerability.
Alternatively, disable Group FaceTime calls altogether.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#63I don't want to be harsh, but Apple really should walk the talk regarding privacy. It has its heart in the right place but bugs like this show how careless they are.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? I don’t think that follows.
>So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? Yes. But it has nothing to do with pointers specifically, just the mindset and training of the average developer who has had experience with them, vs. the average developer who has not. There's an entire generation of developers now graduating from CS programs, hiring into Apple, and getting dumped on these application teams with zero…
One of the headlining features of the latest iOS release was performance.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#65Amazon calls this a feature in Alexa!
This has been disproven time and time again.
OP is referring to the ability to tap into any Alexa device, a feature Amazon calls Drop In (https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...).
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjoint…
You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. (people have complained about it approximately since it was released)
iTunes has always felt robust and well-architected, but it's UI has been a dumpster fire since whenever.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#67I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming.
doesn’t help that their bug bounty program is invite-only ( at least the last time I checked )
Their bug bounty program seems to mostly be aimed at jailbreakers, rather than bugs like these.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#68Not for long. Will be patched in hours, I bet.
This would actually be a fun interview question - how to emergency patch 1B+ globally distributed mobile devices. I would say at least several days for the obvious QA which needs to be done.
>I would say at least several days for the obvious QA which needs to be done.
And you would unfortunately, not get the job.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It reminds me of this MacOS bug from last year, where simply hitting the login box over and over with no password would eventually bypass the security entirely: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_... And this other MacOS bug, also from last year, where the password hint would contain the plain text encryption password: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/05/apple_patches_passw... All within…
Not Apple related, but you could log into any linux box using a specific few versions of grub2 by hitting backspace 28 times: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpdqz/hack-into-...
This bug only applied to grub authentication, which isn't a widely used feature. And you could achieve the same result with boot from disk/USB if that is enabled.
The vuln doesn't give you access to the actual accounts on the computer.
Re: FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
#70I'm always curious how a bug like this ships. I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure. But even before then. Some engineer wrote code for FaceTime that has it open the microphone before the call is accepted. And transmit the audio over the network before the call is accepted. Who did that? And why? I'm not suggesting malice but I do wonder at the lack of defensive programming.
Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjoint…
Most of iOS is still written using Objective-C, including FaceTime. Swift has nothing to do with this.