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‘Zero-click’ hacks are growing in popularity

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

#311

Post by littlestymaar »

tptacek wrote: post #228
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,…

I' don't think the real question is “how feasible is it to rewrite everything in Rust”, because as you say, the answer to this question is clearly “not a all”. But “rewriting all parsers and media codec implementation” is a much smaller goal, and so is “stop writing new codec implementation in memory unsafe language”, yet none of those two more achievable are being pursued either, which is sincerely disappointing.

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

#312

Post by littlestymaar »

b112 wrote: post #173
roca wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This absolutist statement is basically meaningless. Taking Rust as an example (use Swift or even Java if that works better for your use-case), we know how to write Rust code that is guaranteed to be free from common classes of bugs that these zero-click attacks exploit. Yes, we aren't going to get rid of all bugs, yes, zero-click attacks might still be possible once in a while, but we can make it much, much harder an…

we know how to write Rust code that is guaranteed to be free from common classes of bugs that these No we don't. You are trying to shift the sands, by saying "But.. this one thing we can do...", except even that isn't true. If we did, it wouldn't keep happening, year after year, decade after decade. But even with peer reviews, with people supposedly knowing how, well.. it just keeps happening. Do you think every occu…

I guess kind of nihilist conservatism (“why bother changing anything since there's nothing we can do”) may explain why we are in such a bad situation today…

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

#313

Post by mrtksn »

obblekk wrote: post #267

Why don't Apple & Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities. Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse/more frequent/harder to solve afterwards than others. Better yet, why wasn't "rebuild commonly used standard libr…

Remember when Apple replaced mDNSResponder with Discoveryd? It was total disaster, %95 CPU usage and all kind of connectivity issues. They had to bring back mDNSResponder not long after.

So there's no guarantee that the replacements would be bug-free. If anything, the current stuff is battle tested through the years and gets better with each scar. I would guess that they are also employing all kind of hacks, i.e things that are not supposed to be like that but are like that and they will break a lot of things if they make the new code work the way it is supposed to work.

There's even XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/1172/

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

#314

Post by lupire »

recuter wrote: post #196
markdown wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel are arguably the worlds biggest beneficiary of the arms trade. Why would they have anything against selling weapons?

Only in your active imagination. In reality it is roughly in 8th place with 3% marketshare. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/5-charts-that-reveal-...

Now try that analysis per capita.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

dataangel wrote: post #295
phendrenad2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what you're asking for. In reality, you'll end up replacing C code with memory unsafely with Rust code written by people who understand Rust less than they understand C. The problem? The Rust Evangelism Strike Force always assumes that if you replace a C program with a Rust program, it'll be done by a top-tier expert Rust programmer. If that isn't the case (which it won't be), then the whole thing fall…

This is just incorrect. The beauty of Rust is even bad programmers end up writing memory safe code because the compiler enforces it. The ONLY rule an organization needs to enforce on their crappy programmers is not allowing use of unsafe. And there are already available tools for enforcing this in CI, including scanning dependencies.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

b112 wrote: post #25
Grimburger wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> safe code is impossible > Humans cannot write safe software. Ever. No matter what. Formally proven code does what it says on the box? Do we have different definitions of safe perhaps?

You mean, when you look at your code, or someone else does, they think it's ok? I guess that's why security issues, even in massively peer reviewed code, are a thing of the past, right? Do your best, code as safely and securely as you know how, peer review and test and fuzz... Then when you deploy your code, treat it as vulnerable, because history days it likely is. Treat your phone as compromised. Anything network c…

There does actually exist such a thing as formally proven code, which is mathematically according to spec. https://www.sel4.systems/Info/FAQ/proof.pml

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

#317

Post by littlestymaar »

xet7 wrote: post #137
roca wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to be sure of that. We already have ample evidence that code written in Rust has far fewer vulnerabilities than, say, code written in C.

Quoting from https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/8879#58025 > Someone in the thread said he has 30 years experience in programming, and the only new lang which is really close to C in speed is Rust. He has a point. Both C and release-mode Rust have minimal runtimes. C gets there with undefined behavior. Rust gets there with a very, very robust language definition that allows the compiler to reject a lot of unsafe practices…

This is again confusing perfect bug-freedom and memory safety. Rust does guarantee your code won't have bugs (like integer overflow), but it will never lead to memory vulnerabilities (in safe Rust), which means you'll never encounter a remote code execution caused by and integer overflow in Rust.

The key takeaway is the following: Rust programs will contain bugs, but none of those bugs will lead to the kind of crazy vulnerabilities that allow those “zero-click attacks”. Is that perfect? No, but it's an enormous improvement over the status quo.

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

#318

Post by BoxOfRain »

e40 wrote: post #262
tptacek wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I honestly don't understand this. If Google or Apple wanted it to happen, they could force those developers to learn Rust. Are you saying the people that wrote the products in question can't learn Rust well enough to achieve the goal?

It'd still be like replacing the engines of an aeroplane mid-flight surely? I know Rust can do C interop and it'd probably be done piecemeal but it'd still be an absolutely gargantuan task. I'd say there's a fair chance the sheer time and effort such an undertaking would involve would cost more than the memory safety bugs using C or C++ introduces.

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

#320

Post by pvg »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #301
pvg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is pretty special. iOS alone is over a decade old and a constantly evolving target and it's itself a direct descendant of a 30+ year old system.

> a constantly evolving target That decreases the amount of code to replace, doesn't it?

How so? New not-in-safe-languages code is being added all the time.
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