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How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

googleprojectzero.blogspot.com

31–40 of 120 posts

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#31
FTA: "...the LightSpeed bug was fixed in iOS 12 with a patch that didn't address the root cause and instead just turned the race condition double-free into a memory leak. Then, in iOS 13, this memory leak was identified as a bug and "fixed" by reintroducing the original bug, again without addressing the root cause of the issue..."

Ooof. Talk about running in circles. Either this was someone who is swamped with work and spaced out, or a new programmer who wasn't familiar with the original. Oddly, I feel bad for both of them!

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, removing the need to jailbreak for such control would mean that this dichotomy would not have to exist…

If you remove the need for a jailbreak in order to allow arbitrary code to run on any device, you're allowing arbitrary malware to run on any device.

The problem is not running arbitrary code, but running arbitrary code without informed consent. Malware runs without consent. Apple's solution for iOS is removing the ability to run anything completely, bypassing the need to figure out how to obtain consent.

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the attacks on various human rights activists- those are using the same exploits that jailbreaks use. Fixing bugs used to attack people means fixing bugs used for jailbreaks. There isn’t some magical mechanism by which a jailbreak exploit isn’t exploitable but anyone else.

> Look at the attacks on various human rights activists I believe all these begin with browser or existing-app based exploits. None of them seem to rely on tricking the user into installing a new app. That would be too suspicious for the user, and would entail the attacker uploading their exploit code to apple, and giving apple a full list of users who they exploited...

Not sure if this call is allowed through the new syscall filter in WebKit, but before it this was one JavaScriptCore bug away from achieving the same thing.

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#34

FTA: "...the LightSpeed bug was fixed in iOS 12 with a patch that didn't address the root cause and instead just turned the race condition double-free into a memory leak. Then, in iOS 13, this memory leak was identified as a bug and "fixed" by reintroducing the original bug, again without addressing the root cause of the issue..." Ooof. Talk about running in circles. Either this was someone who is swamped with work a…

...or the more interesting and perhaps less plausible explanation: someone who doesn't toe the line, someone who was trying to "take down the system from within"...

I often wonder what goes through the minds of those whose work helps companies exert more control over their customers. Maybe some of them are not so "obedient" after all...

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#35

Since this always comes up, here's an overview I made several weeks ago about where Project Zero focuses their efforts: All counts are rough numbers. Project zero posts: Google: 24 Apple: 28 Microsoft: 36 I was curious, so I poked around the project zero bug tracker to try to find ground truth about their bug reporting: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list For all issues, including closed: product=And…

Project Zero has uncovered 2033 issues... The majority of those could be used alone to ruin your life. The rest might require 2 (Eg. one for the sandbox, one for the kernel).

Thats a team of ~10 security researchers over many years...

Considering how many are being discovered each day/month/year, chances are that there are at least hundreds undiscovered...

If it only takes one to ruin your life, and a good security researcher can find one in a few weeks, or months at most, the barrier to someone evil is really really low...

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, removing the need to jailbreak for such control would mean that this dichotomy would not have to exist…

If you remove the need for a jailbreak in order to allow arbitrary code to run on any device, you're allowing arbitrary malware to run on any device.

To be more specific, the problem is that malware is a separate category from useful and harmless application code that people want to run but that Apple doesn't want to allow for a variety of reasons, but Apple forbids both types of software.

(Focusing on user consent obscures the actual problem; people often consent to running malware. What matters is whether the software to be run is useful and harmless.)

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove the need for a jailbreak in order to allow arbitrary code to run on any device, you're allowing arbitrary malware to run on any device.

The problem is not running arbitrary code, but running arbitrary code without informed consent. Malware runs without consent. Apple's solution for iOS is removing the ability to run anything completely, bypassing the need to figure out how to obtain consent.

> bypassing the need to figure out how to obtain consent

How do you propose getting “informed” consent from an audience who doesn’t care and willingly expose everything about themselves and everyone they know to find out which Star Wars character or 80s pop song they are most like? Genuine question, as this doesn’t seem the least bit a solved problem anywhere.

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#38

FTA: "...the LightSpeed bug was fixed in iOS 12 with a patch that didn't address the root cause and instead just turned the race condition double-free into a memory leak. Then, in iOS 13, this memory leak was identified as a bug and "fixed" by reintroducing the original bug, again without addressing the root cause of the issue..." Ooof. Talk about running in circles. Either this was someone who is swamped with work a…

...or the more interesting and perhaps less plausible explanation: someone who doesn't toe the line, someone who was trying to "take down the system from within"... I often wonder what goes through the minds of those whose work helps companies exert more control over their customers. Maybe some of them are not so "obedient" after all...

Hanlon's Razor suggests otherwise. People said that the Windows Metafile bug in 2005 was a backdoor, which was obviously wrong.

Re: How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not running arbitrary code, but running arbitrary code without informed consent. Malware runs without consent. Apple's solution for iOS is removing the ability to run anything completely, bypassing the need to figure out how to obtain consent.

> bypassing the need to figure out how to obtain consent How do you propose getting “informed” consent from an audience who doesn’t care and willingly expose everything about themselves and everyone they know to find out which Star Wars character or 80s pop song they are most like? Genuine question, as this doesn’t seem the least bit a solved problem anywhere.

It's not an easy problem! But Apple should work on solving it–they have already put in some effort in this direction on macOS, although they have their hands tied behind their back there because they're going from unrestrictive → restrictive and such changes usually break things and make people angry. On iOS they pretty much have a "clean slate" with which to start with.

Usually, solutions in this area generally have a couple of characteristics: the first is that the "secure" case is generally useful for 95+% of people, to the point that they might not even know that there are other "modes" that are more permissive. The second is putting surmountable but significant barriers in place to prevent disabling these features, in an attempt to prevent casual/unintentional deactivation. Strange key combinations that lead to scary text and wiping the device seem to be fairly effective in keeping out people who cannot give informed consent. And a third is allowing a user-specified root of trust: for example, one can imagine an iPhone that is every bit as secure as any other iPhone today because I have enabled all the security features, but it's using my keys to attest against instead of Apple's. There's a lot of interesting work being done in this area: one I personally like is Chromebooks, which have the dual purpose of being secure, "locked-down" devices for general consumer use, but also for being useful for development work. And there we're seeing interesting solutions such as using KVM to run an isolated Linux, developer mode, write protect screws, …

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