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A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

reuters.com

41–50 of 184 posts

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#41

Would compiling image parsers with ASLR and bounds checking prevent these zero-click hacks? I haven’t researched the exploits in detail but it seems to me Apple can develop better protection against such zero-click exploits. At the very least, iMessages shouldn’t preview images from unknown contacts.

I'm convinced that a bad image parser is apple's backdoor, but I only have my paranoia as proof.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#42

Would compiling image parsers with ASLR and bounds checking prevent these zero-click hacks? I haven’t researched the exploits in detail but it seems to me Apple can develop better protection against such zero-click exploits. At the very least, iMessages shouldn’t preview images from unknown contacts.

The image parser uses ASLR. The turing complete NAND computing device they describe in the article was used to do computations on the pointers leaked with the infoleak, resulting in an ASLR bypass. Brilliant.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#43
post #13

Tech has essentially created this problem. Can’t tech fix it?

Not to sound like a broken record but…. This was yet another memory management bug that would have been prevented if using a memory safe language

On a brighter note, apple is currently in the process of converting almost all iMessage components to Swift for this reason. I'm sure it is taking many engineering hours, and image parsers/open source libraries like this are the most difficult to convert.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#44
post #13

Tech has essentially created this problem. Can’t tech fix it?

Not to sound like a broken record but…. This was yet another memory management bug that would have been prevented if using a memory safe language

I’m only a few more CVE’s from advocating C++ and Objective(ly)-C(rap) proponents be subject to registration and public humiliation whenever the (inevitable) next issue occurs.

I get it, legacy crap has momentum and you can’t ignore that. What’s not ok is the mountain of people who pretend that’s not a problem.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound like a broken record but…. This was yet another memory management bug that would have been prevented if using a memory safe language

On a brighter note, apple is currently in the process of converting almost all iMessage components to Swift for this reason. I'm sure it is taking many engineering hours, and image parsers/open source libraries like this are the most difficult to convert.

Let’s hope they make swift work of it

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#46
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two different types of attacks. One is fly-by attacks by random viruses and ransomware. For those cases, I would not worry about pictures. Other is when you are targeted by regimes with essentially unlimited budget. In that case yes, the picture can be a spyware.

How does one know which category they are in?

There's classical literature on this:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound like a broken record but…. This was yet another memory management bug that would have been prevented if using a memory safe language

On a brighter note, apple is currently in the process of converting almost all iMessage components to Swift for this reason. I'm sure it is taking many engineering hours, and image parsers/open source libraries like this are the most difficult to convert.

[deleted]

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#49

Isn't the walled garden and locked down OS/hardware supposed to prevent these things?

Only provably correct software would prevent such things.

A walled garden could make it simpler to enforce that only software proved correct can be installed, but without the proof, it does not guarantee much,,only makes certain things less probable.

Writing provably correct software us now a rare and expensive engineering feat. Most consumer OSes have nothing of thus sort, sadly. And I mean just the limited set of system software, not third-party installable apps, of course.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#50

Isn't the walled garden and locked down OS/hardware supposed to prevent these things?

>Isn't the walled garden

No, only real security helps, some dude reviewing GUI or business related rules help with nothing, and Apple security automated checks are week, stronger sandboxes are needed in wall gardens or walled gardens with a gate.

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