‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
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‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
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Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#2As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible.
What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#3As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible. What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
AFAIK, they are exploiting vulnerabilities in image and video decoders
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#4"no way to stop them" = the economic impact to Apple isn't big enough to justify the engineering / rewrites required to completely prevent them.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#5Zero click hacks have been around for all of computing. Nothing connected to the internet, connected to a network, has ever, ever been safe.
All you can do is reduce attack surface, and most of all, monitor.
Another comment blames Apple, and financial incentives. Sure, there may be some of that.
But the reality is that safe code is impossible. Now, you may say "But...", yet think about this.
For all of computing history, all of it, no matter what language, no matter how careful, there is always a vulnerability to be had.
Thinking about software, and security any other way, is an immediate fail.
Arguing the contrary, is arguing that the endless litany of endless security updates, for the stuff discovered, doesn't exist.
And those updates oyly cover stuff discovered. There are endless zero days right now, being exploited in the wild, without patches, of which we are unaware.
We're seen vulnerabilities on every kernel, in mainline software, on every platform, sitting for years too. And you know those are discovered by black hats, and used for a long time before being found out by the rest of the community.
Humans cannot write safe software. Ever. No matter what.
Get over it.
Only detailed, targeted monitoring can help you detect intrusion attempts, expose as little as possible, keep updated, and do your best.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#6As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible. What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
From what I recall the stagefright vulnerability might be a good example.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#7As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible. What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
There are software engineers who sometimes write code that’s not perfect.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#8As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible. What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
This one is a good example: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
Really worth the read, it was quite eye-opening.
> JBIG2 doesn't have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That's exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It's not as fast as Javascript, but it's fundamentally computationally equivalent.
> The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It's pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#9As a software engineer I still don't understand how this is even possible. What kind of logic behind a URL preview can bypass everything? I think companies like NSO Group are just finding backdoors not software bugs.
From the article:
> In December, security researchers at Google analyzed a zero-click exploit they said was developed by NSO Group, which could be used to break into an iPhone by sending someone a fake GIF image through iMessage.
And the thread from back then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568625
That Project Zero blog post lays out the details under the "One weird trick" header.
Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity
#10"no way to stop them" = the economic impact to Apple isn't big enough to justify the engineering / rewrites required to completely prevent them.
Apple, or Microsoft, or Samsung, or Ubuntu, or Google, or whoever can do all the system level bulletproofing they want. People will still write apps. And those apps, probably upwards of 99.999999% of them will be unsafe.
It would take a sea change in the mindsets of software engineers globally to centralize the software development process around a security mindset. That's not going to happen unfortunately. The vast majority of us have neither the expertise, nor the time, to develop 100% secure code. The best most of us conscientious types can do is to provide comprehensive monitoring, so that a user can use those tools to know if and when something is amiss.