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Which is why the only safe way to operate is assume anything that is susceptible to outside data is already compromised - and so run them in sandboxes.
That's not a solution. You're just piping the outside data into your sandbox; it can have bugs too.
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Which is why the only safe way to operate is assume anything that is susceptible to outside data is already compromised - and so run them in sandboxes.
The tech is the easy part: iOS/Android have the best security teams in the world, and an unlimited budget, and sandboxing is an old, proven tech. I guess that the politics here are the real barrier.
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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.
The industry will only really change when pushed to do so.
Tech has essentially created this problem. Can’t tech fix it?
Construction has essentially created the problem of potholes. Can they fix it?
Eventually this will be standard in software as well.
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.
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Good analogy. Question here is: can they fix potholes faster than new ones show up? Seems answer is no for tech. And construction, these days.
It takes an expert to know that there's vulnerability. Whereas construction engineer can "see" the pothole and so they can fix it. Software engineer has to "know from exploits" that there's a vulnerability so they can fix it. It's not far away when OS are written in memory safe languages like Rust.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
Nowadays still being sold to governments that care about security.
https://itupdate.com.au/page/unisys-clearpath-mcp-unsurpasse...
https://www.unisys.com/ms/client-education/course-catalog/cl...
Or maybe 1983?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000
Maybe 1982,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375449
Plenty of examples (those are a tiny snippet) on how safe OSes should be written, until there is liability the easiest way will always win.
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Holy shit. My relatives have asked me in the past "could this [image|video|other supposedly innocuous file format] be a virus or hack my phone?". I've always told them not to worry. Can't do that anymore.
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.
If this was the case, exploits would never be published or abused, and jailbreaks wouldn't exist because this logic says that those who find exploits will either disclose them "responsibly" or sell them to a nation-state.
If the idea of non-state hackers doesn't bother you, recognize that organized crime is a billion dollar industry and fraud rings would love root access on tons of normal people's devices, including your own.
How come the company that made Pegasus is being sanctioned, but the government that used Pegasus to abduct, kill, and then dismember a dissident - isn't?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Metafile_vulnerability Long story short: Windows library routines for handling an obscure, obsolete image format had a parser flaw. Simply rendering an appropriately crafted image via the standard Windows APIs -- whether in a web browser, file explorer, file preview, word processor, anywhere -- resulted in kernel-level arbitrary code execution. Now, we've gotten a bit smarter abo…
Which is why the only safe way to operate is assume anything that is susceptible to outside data is already compromised - and so run them in sandboxes.