561–570 of 886 posts
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I wonder why Apple does not include a hypervisor in iOS, and "risky" processes such as iMessage, Safari (maybe a Secure Safari version) could then be executed in a separate virtual machine. The hardware (CPU + RAM) in the iPhones these days should be able to sustain it. Or would there be serious drawbacks to this ?
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This is such a trivial exploit, why in the world they decided to write an own JPEG decoder, and stumble on the seemingly most trivial case of input sanitation?
I would add sole reliance on sandboxing instead of principial stance on writing on overall secure, high quality, and higly verified codebase is obviously failing.
I just want to add this: these people operate pretty much in the open. They're not ashamed of it either, or else they wouldn't put it on their CV:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/nso-group/people/
That right there tells me that we as "the tech community" are way too okay with this sort of application of the tech. The tech we're all so convinced will "make the world a better place." /s
How many exploits has iMessage had now? Isn't it time we made first messages from all new contacts plain text only, and all other messages some very restricted subset rather than some crazy extensible system that isn't so different from ActiveX? And on top of that, maybe the whole app should run in a sandbox. And on top of that, perhaps it should all be a webview to give one more layer of protection.
There is even precedent for doing this seamlessly: the Apple Mail client will not render media from unknown senders without user confirmation. iMessage should have the exact same behavior for the same reasons. It’s frustrating to watch greedy project managers re-learning the exact same lessons that a previous generation already learned the hard way, especially when they all work in the same building.
How many exploits has iMessage had now? Isn't it time we made first messages from all new contacts plain text only, and all other messages some very restricted subset rather than some crazy extensible system that isn't so different from ActiveX? And on top of that, maybe the whole app should run in a sandbox. And on top of that, perhaps it should all be a webview to give one more layer of protection.
What's not clear to me is given all of the layers/security features Apple has, say you are able to get an iMessage exploit where you can run code... you can't access the file system/cache of other apps (like your banking app to get cookies/tokens), can you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an awfully big preallocated array you have there. It would be pretty inefficient for that section of memory to be copied around, right? Let's map it into both processes. Also, image decoding is pretty hard, let's offload some of it to dedicated hardware. Of course, that hardware needs to have access to it mediated by the kernel. And the hardware needs to be able to access that shared memory, which was of cours…
Mapping pure RGBA across processes is safe, but also a single extra copy is not a big performance impact in the first place for an image decoder. Configuring the IOMMU is one of the easiest parts of doing it in hardware. That's not going to make things "difficult to secure". And allocating the chunk of memory is trivial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t use SMS instead of iMessage though. Then all your texts will be sent across the network without any kind of decent encryption. And WhatsApp is almost unusable unless you consent to uploading all your contacts to Facebook. (IIRC this was the red line that got crossed that caused the WhatsApp founder to quit FB post-acquisition.) Signal is a good recommendation, but you won’t be able to convince 100% of people yo…
> And WhatsApp is almost unusable unless you consent to uploading all your contacts to Facebook. What? How-so? I've never allowed it to do that and it works fine for me, across iOS/Mac/Windows.
The only thing preventing this would be grsec for iOS.
Grsecurity generally focuses on the kernel side of things, although it does include a number of userspace mitigations as well. Still, when you have such ripe primitives not even Grsecurity can protect you. What we really need is to just have radically lower bug density. Buffer overflows need to die. UAFs need to be made far less common. The "distance" between vulns needs to be greatly increased. Having design and val…
Wow, so much discussion of Apple and their software, and so little of NSO group and why they're even a thing. I just want to add this: these people operate pretty much in the open. They're not ashamed of it either, or else they wouldn't put it on their CV: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nso-group/people/ That right there tells me that we as "the tech community" are way too okay with this sort of application of the…