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

citizenlab.ca

811–820 of 886 posts

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

#811

I don't need to be able to accept iMessage messages from random numbers. I'd be happy to enable "Prevent messages from unknown numbers" for example. Is this possible?

Yeah, its starting to get weird that they refuse to implement this. Its almost like certain stakeholders need to be able to randomly text you with malware and refuse the notion of being silenced.

Same thing with the iCloud email addresses you can't delete and that have to exist if you have an AppleID, despite never using them.

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

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an attack vector because it’s convenient. If iMessage didn’t exist people would email you exploits.

Are there zero click exploits in email?

There have been! One was in Microsoft Outlook parsing email subject lines, so you had to do was recieve email in order to get hacked. And there was another one around when heartbleed was a thing that had to do with parsing of the DNS lookup and response of who the email was coming from.

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

#813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does if we grant the two the same assumptions. If we assume that serious, unjustified harm would occur by failing to act, and they are in a reasonable position to act… then I’d say a private company is equally justified in doing the same thing. However, you’re assuming the government is justified merely because it’s the government.

Do you think private companies should be allowed to, say, arrest people?

Private companies aren't, but in certain circumstances private citizens working for those companies are. In the US (except perhaps Georgia?) if a crazy guy comes into your workplace waving a knife around, you're allowed to disarm him and pin him down on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest#United_Stat...

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

#814
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding something in rust into a browser means you now need to bundle all of the needed crates and that your browser now also needs rustc to build… at a minimum. You also need potentially to audit all the crates and keep them up to date and so on… without crates you can't do so much.

I can see that for components heavily interfacing with high surface area things like encryption, hardware interfacing etc., but why would that be true for a relatively “pure” computational problem like an image codec? Bytes in, bytes out.

[dead]

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

#815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your problem isn't the quality of your own code, it's that Google exists and is unable to stop their employees from doing stupid things like inventing WebP, because now you need to support WebP too which means using their code to do it. (Worse, WebP is at least two completely different formats - the lossless mode has nothing to do with the lossy mode.)

I think that: a) Google should be doing that in a memory safe language, kinda nuts that they haven't started doing that already b) Apple could definitely write their own? Unless I'm missing something crazy here, it seems like they could burn 8 figures and just have their own implementations that are safe

If you reimplemented it they'd just change it. It's Google, they can't stop themselves.

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

#816
post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Saudis have one very big lever they can use to force the west to do what it wants: gas prices. The United States gets most of its petroleum from Canada. Saudi Arabia accounts for only 7% of U.S. petroleum and crude oil imports. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

The US is the largest oil producing country in the world. Mostly from Texas. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&t=6 2nd is Saudi Arabia then Russia. However it happens that US is also the largest consumer and their production doesn't meet the demand so they have to import from other countries like Canada and Saudi Arabia So Saudi Arabia most definitely does have a lever, and so does Russia since the rest o…

I want to add that even if the US produced more oil, we currently don't have enough industrial refining capacity for the type of crude that we produce to meet our demand, so we would still need to rely on foreign imports.

https://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/blog/2018/06/14/w....

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

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your problem isn't the quality of your own code, it's that Google exists and is unable to stop their employees from doing stupid things like inventing WebP, because now you need to support WebP too which means using their code to do it. (Worse, WebP is at least two completely different formats - the lossless mode has nothing to do with the lossy mode.)

As opposed to Apple’s formats, for which the parsers are definitely less buggy and likely to be hacked.

[deleted]

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

#818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that those other apps don’t use email addresses as the handle to contact someone. If someone iMessages you, the iMessage might (appear to) come from their phone number, or it could (appear to) come from their email. If you have an iMessage contact that’s just an email and you iMessage them, it works fine. If you try to then add Android users to your group chat, everyone gets SMS and the iMessage user wit…

I'm fairly certain that "text to email" is a feature of MMS - I've used it a few times years before iPhones were around. I don't remember if MMS is enabled by default in iOS but theres a toggle to disable it, and realistically there's very minimal real world use-case for MMS these days.

Yes, it’s an MMS feature. But iMessage makes it way too easy to “text to email” inadvertently when you start a group chat with some non-iPhone users. MMS sucks but it’s the universal way for iPhone and Android users to communicate without needing everyone to be on the same third-party messaging platform like WhatsApp. In my US-centric personal experience, there is no universally accepted messaging app you can be certain that everyone is on.

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

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code to calculate size of preallocated array is incorrect. Size ends up too small or underflows. If you go outside the array you copied/mapped out of the sandbox, then that doesn't let the attacker code escape the sandbox, you just put some of your own data onto the screen. If you mean the sandbox isn't given enough memory, then that will make the sandbox exit when it hits unmapped addresses. And how did you screw…

> And how did you screw up length x width x 4? There’s a million ways to screw that up. People botch SCM merges. People are hungover. People are distracted. People are tired. People are heartbroken. People are going through divorces. People have parents dying. People forget numbers. People make copy-paste mistakes. All the time. > The sandboxed process doesn't have any way to exfiltrate data. You can abuse it to gain…

> People make copy-paste mistakes. All the time.

But if you do that every image looks wrong and it's vanishingly unlikely to get into a release.

> You can abuse it to gain a (known-page-offset) write primitive in the other, non-sandboxed process to which the buffer is also mapped.

There's no reason to have the memory mapped into both processes at once, and you can't exploit the bytes you write without a real vulnerability.

Since it's a one-shot write into the buffer, if your intent is using it as an exploit step then you might as well encode an actual image with your exploit-assisting bytes.

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

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that: a) Google should be doing that in a memory safe language, kinda nuts that they haven't started doing that already b) Apple could definitely write their own? Unless I'm missing something crazy here, it seems like they could burn 8 figures and just have their own implementations that are safe

If you reimplemented it they'd just change it. It's Google, they can't stop themselves.

I don't believe you, frankly. I don't believe that Google makes breaking changes to existing image formats often.
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