11–20 of 408 posts
As 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
Zero 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 hist…
> Humans cannot write safe software. Ever. No matter what.
Formally proven code does what it says on the box? Do we have different definitions of safe perhaps?
"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…
99% of the problem is just wanting to not have to rewrite a hundred parsers in memory-safe languages.
It's just economics and engineering.
They don't have to change everyone's minds or fix the world. They'd need to invest a lot but so far nobody really thinks it's worth it.
Zero 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 hist…
Humans cannot write bug-free software[1]. Then if you're soft has security-related things to do (like credential management etc.) you cannot be sure there won't be a way to bypass it.
But here we're talking almost exclusively about remote execution bugs coming from memory-safety issues, which are indeed preventable. Any managed language does the trick, and if they are not fast enough for your use-case there is Rust. (And, before anyone mentions it, since this isn't some low-level/hardware related thing, you don't need to use unsafe Rust).
Rewrites are costly and take time, but we're talking about the wealthiest company on Earth, and this issues has been around for years so they don't really have an excuse…
[1]: at least without using formal verification tools, which are admittedly not practical enough…
People keep saying RIR is some how pointless but the reality is that its impossible to keep ahead of those vulnerabilities that aren't found yet.
Zero 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 hist…
> safe code is impossible > Humans cannot write safe software. Ever. No matter what. Formally proven code does what it says on the box? Do we have different definitions of safe perhaps?
Zero 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 hist…
> safe code is impossible > Humans cannot write safe software. Ever. No matter what. Formally proven code does what it says on the box? Do we have different definitions of safe perhaps?
It becomes an infinite recursion of "how do we know the proof of the proof of the..." is what we actually want?
I think this OS deserves more attention. By the way, new version 4.1 is out: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/02/04/qubes-4-1-0/.