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I wonder if the Apple representative who said this would be "fixed later this week" realizes this allows any attacker to wiretap any iPhone user (that has the vuln)
Yeah, that's bizarre. If my team were responsible for a bug like this, we'd be fixing it before we went home.
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-mac-flaw-exposes-your-pass... Where sending somebody a .tiff file via iMessage, web page, or email would give the attacker RCE on the device.
The article slug is misleading, and suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the scope of the bug. A RCE in Messages does not allow attackers to steal your passwords.
I'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.
Most likely 2 different teams worked on it. One worked on accepting calls, the other worked on transmitting audio, another probably worked on video. Then it got integrated and complete e2e testing wasn't done.
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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.
Desperate times call for faster-deployment. Been there. Sometimes, you might even need to patch a binary.
Security and privacy are two big parts of the marketing for the iPhone. I'm curious how they can mitigate the reputational damage. Edit: It gets worse: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/28/18201383/apple-facetime-b... If the recipient rejects the call by pressing the power button, it starts sending video.
¹http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&...
²http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopa...
I'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.
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…
Extra creepy.
Also, FaceTime never closes after a call cleanly. Camera stays up until you right click + quite the app...
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Not sure if this was intentional but in security, Alice and Bob wre the names in hypotheticals for the attacker and unwitting victim since the RSA paper. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
Your comment shows a clear lack of contextual insight into general software security. Alice (A) and Bob (B) are ubiquitous in discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
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Yeah, that's bizarre. If my team were responsible for a bug like this, we'd be fixing it before we went home.
The team might be able to fix it today, but the fix needs to go through testing and then be built alongside the rest of iOS (a multi-hour process). I wouldn’t be surprised if this takes two or three days to roll out.