NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild • Hacker News Board

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#291

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #256

jacquesm wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So stop shipping iPhones to Israel until they play ball. If they're that smart they can roll their own phones. These companies do immense damage and endanger lives the world over. Given enough time and budget there is nothing that can't be cracked and it's the very worst actors that have access to this stuff.

As much as I agree with you... I think it's most likely that the US NSA, UK's MI(whatever), Israel's Mossad and a bunch of other secret services all cooperate with each other. No way these guys get taken down, and no way that the sanctions that have been nominally announced actually get enforced at the murky, intransparent bottom layer of the secret services. Someone has to crack open the phones of drug kingpins, ter…

Those groups do not generally deal with NSO.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#292

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:49 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #270

hot_gril wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? They'll just buy iPhones in some other country.

GPS is a thing. iPhones have GPS.

Ok, and these companies develop zero-day exploits for a living. You think region-locking is going to work?

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#293

Post by acdha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #226

jacquesm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of being boring: software liability would go a long way towards getting companies to do this work themselves. Even though Apple is the largest company on the planet an entity that has a small fraction of the budget is apparently able to do a better job. I don't see why Apple couldn't make those people an offer they can't refuse. That takes them off the market and has them doing something productive.

Software liability would effectively crush smaller companies, unable to keep up with the lawsuits, because they don't have billions in the bank.

Or you’d have separate rules, similar to how you can make kit cars or ultralight airplanes without being held to the same scrutiny as Boeing or GM.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#294

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:51 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #252

14 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is frustrating is the NSO group continues to exist despite all the bad they do. How many people are they responsible for being on the receiving end of a bone saw?

Are you sure they are doing so much bad? They get some press for it, but the rule about news is they report only the non-typical thing. The vast majority of the NSO's work is stuff you would not object to, but that's boring and doesn't qualify as news.

Most organizations are not universally immoral, yes.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#295

Post by bawolff » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:52 PM UTC

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #79

l33t7332273 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no wonder China is banning government officials from using their devices. Do you actually think security is the reason they are being banned? I think the reasons are far more political than technical.

Technology is political.

All things are political and technology is a thing.

That doesn't mean you can't analyze if a specific technical decision was made primarily on technical grounds/merit or if it is mostly a political one without a technical basis.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#296

Post by brobinson » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:52 PM UTC

Firmwarrior wrote: post #142

ikekkdcjkfke wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loading anything other than text from unknown senders...

It pisses me off man. If someone sends you a link on iOS, you can't copy it without doing a long press that loads all the spyware on the website in a preview window

With lockdown mode on, I have to explicitly tap a line of text on the popup to load the preview.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#297

Post by agnosticmantis » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

I find it interesting that most comments here are blaming the victim (Apple’s iMessage and by transitivity its users) rather than the aggressor (NSO and its users).

How come NSO isn’t yet designated as a (cyber-)terrorist group worth hunting down and extinguishing?

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#298

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:55 PM UTC

rakkhi wrote: post #123

ruuda wrote: post #70

Again a buffer overflow in image decoding, that sounds similar to the one from 2021 [1]. That one was wild, building a CPU out of primitives offered by an arcane image compression format embedded in pdf, to be able to do enough arithmetic to further escalate to arbitrary code execution! [1]: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

Again buffer overflow in image decoding. Would think apple might just #threatmodel and #fuzz that to death... but you would be wrong. 2.7T market cap company can't do this...

While not discounting the need to increase investment in this area, I will mention that there are very few things that can be solved by #buzzwords and #hashtags.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#299

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:56 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #176

washadjeffmad wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a nation state.

Apple has more employees than Kiribati's population. More employees than the smallest 60 countries.

Most of those people are not engineers.

Re: NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

#300

Post by vilunov » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 11:56 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #242

NegativeK wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you show me software that's immune to advanced 0-days, I'll show you software that isn't usable.

That depends entirely on what the software needs to do. For image decoding in particular, you can put the software into an exceptionally restrictive sandbox, or use a language that builds in the same restrictions. No I/O. No system calls. Just churn internally and fill a preallocated section of memory with RGBA. The broader system will still have weaknesses, but it won't have this kind, and this kind keeps happening.

What exactly is "an exceptionally restrictive sandbox"?

There are virtual machines such as JVM, V8, or even QEMU. These are sandboxes, which run either some special bytecode or native code with extreme performance drawbacks. Media decoders are performance- and energy-sensitive pieces of software in the end.

And media decoders actually ARE sandboxes of sorts. They are designed to interpret media formats, sometimes even Turing-complete bytecode in retrictive and isolated environments. And like any sandboxes, they too have bugs.