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‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

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Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#221

Post by azinman2 »

NohatCoder wrote: post #169
xavxav wrote: post #45

Not to go all 'Rust Evangelism Strike Force' but almost universally, these exploits leverage memory unsafety somewhere in the stack, usually in a parser of some kind (image, text, etc). The fact that this is still tolerated in our core systems is a pox on our industry. You don't have to use Rust, and it won't eliminate every bug (far from it), but memory safety is not optional . We truly need to work more towards eli…

Nothing wrong with Rust, but I still think making operating systems with airtight sandboxing and proper permission enforcement is the only thing that can truly solve these issues.

Look at how often V8’s sandboxes get exploited. It’s all developed by humans, which means there will always be errors.

Saying just make airtight sandboxes is like just write bug-free code.

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#222

Post by dagmx »

NohatCoder wrote: post #169
xavxav wrote: post #45

Not to go all 'Rust Evangelism Strike Force' but almost universally, these exploits leverage memory unsafety somewhere in the stack, usually in a parser of some kind (image, text, etc). The fact that this is still tolerated in our core systems is a pox on our industry. You don't have to use Rust, and it won't eliminate every bug (far from it), but memory safety is not optional . We truly need to work more towards eli…

Nothing wrong with Rust, but I still think making operating systems with airtight sandboxing and proper permission enforcement is the only thing that can truly solve these issues.

I feel like those are two separate levels of concerns though.

Airtight sandboxing would be easier in a memory safe language prevents certain classes of bugs.

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#223

Post by dagmx »

saagarjha wrote: post #147
alophawen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said it would be easy, but it is already happening. https://medium.com/@tinocaer/how-microsoft-is-adopting-rust-... https://preettheman.medium.com/this-is-what-apple-uses-rust-...

I don't think Apple is shipping anything customer facing that's built on Rust?

Not in rust, but they did:

- Add reference counting to ObjC to get rid of a lot of use after free bugs (still of course possible because it's just a language suggestion and not strictly enforced like Rust or Swift)

- push for adding ObjC notations to let the tooling help catch some set of bugs. Still not perfect by any means but helps a little.

- created an entirely new memory safe language as Swift.

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#224

Post by dagmx »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #63
xavxav wrote: post #45

Not to go all 'Rust Evangelism Strike Force' but almost universally, these exploits leverage memory unsafety somewhere in the stack, usually in a parser of some kind (image, text, etc). The fact that this is still tolerated in our core systems is a pox on our industry. You don't have to use Rust, and it won't eliminate every bug (far from it), but memory safety is not optional . We truly need to work more towards eli…

Yeah, I started noticing huge flaws in Apple's Music app, which I told them about and work around mostly, but...are they because Apple software is written in C? C++, Objective-C, same thing. Like can C code ever really be airtight?

Apple Music isn't a great example because depending on which OS and version you're running, it's essentially a hosted web application.

Or given how new it is, it's likely majority written in Swift when presenting a native app

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#225

Post by abecedarius »

falsenapkin wrote: post #123
xyzzy123 wrote: post #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.

It's baffling that they won't at least disable previews for senders not in your contacts. Ideally they would provide a way to block certain types of senders outright. I will NEVER want to receive an iMessage from an unknown email address, but that's where all of the spam crap comes from. Recently I was on my phone when I received an email address iMessage and the toast showed an absolutely insane link, when I opened…

Does it solve this to set a different app as your default app for texts? (Hopefully a more secure app.)

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#227

Post by xvector »

phh wrote: post #86
aborsy wrote: post #59

We need a security focused phone. General purpose consumer phones are focused on features; security is not a top priority for the average person. What are the options now?

Not sure who is "we" here, but yes I agree, a general purpose customer phone can't be considered secure against state-level hackers, there MUST be tradeoffs. As an example, I consider that a secure phone MUST have boot-time full disk encryption passphrase, which needs to be different from lockscreen. For obvious reasons (which is that the user will tend forget their password), you can't have this even as an option on…

> even though lately their focus is no longer security for business reasons.

Context?

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#228

Post by tptacek »

xavxav wrote: post #45

Not to go all 'Rust Evangelism Strike Force' but almost universally, these exploits leverage memory unsafety somewhere in the stack, usually in a parser of some kind (image, text, etc). The fact that this is still tolerated in our core systems is a pox on our industry. You don't have to use Rust, and it won't eliminate every bug (far from it), but memory safety is not optional . We truly need to work more towards eli…

It's worth engaging with the fact that essentially nobody disagrees with this (someone will here, but they don't matter), and that it's not happening not because Apple and Google don't want it to happen, but because it's incredibly, galactically hard to pull off. The Rust talent pool required to transition the entire attack surface of an iPhone from C, C++, and ObjC to Rust (substitute any other memory safe language, same deal) doesn't exist. The techniques required to train and scale such a talent pool are nascent and unproven.

There is probably not a check Apple can write to fix this problem with memory safe programming languages. And Apple can write all possible checks. There's something profound about that.

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#229

Post by toast0 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #216
radford-neal wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use a C compiler that produces memory-safe code? I'm sure someone else has already thought of this, but in case not... All you need to do is represent a pointer by three addresses - the actual pointer, a low bound, and a high bound. Then *p = 0 compiles to code that checks that the pointer is in bounds before storing zero there. I believe such a compiler would conform to the C stan…

That's essentially what ASAN is, with some black magic for performance and scope reasons. The problem is that ensuring that your code will detect or catch memory unsafety isn't enough, because the language itself isn't designed to incorporate the implications of that. If you're writing a system messenger for example, you can't just crash unless you want to turn all memory unsafety into a zero-click denial of service.

Based on recent experience, you'd really want your media decoders compiled with a safe compiler, and if it crashes, don't show the media and move on. Performance is an issue, but given the choice between RCE and DoS, DoS is preferable.

It would be nice if everything was memory safe, but making media decoding memory safe would help a lot.

Re: ‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

#230

Post by f311a »

rosndo wrote: post #47

Years ago we used to regularly have worms that’d infect millions of computers without any clicks at all. The truth is that “Zero-Click” hacks are becoming increasingly rare. But of course everything is new for journos unfamiliar with the field.

Exactly, 10 years ago tens of millions users were using outdated Flash and Internet Explorer. Literally everyone could infect them using pretty old exploits. There were no autoupdates.
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