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I can't for the life of me find it, but there was a paper a few years ago about evading App Store policies by purposely introducing vulnerabilities in your app.
by jacobwcarlson 11y ago
I can't for the life of me find it, but there was a paper a few years ago about evading App Store policies by purposely introducing vulnerabilities in your app. The idea being that e.g. you have a buffer overflow and the app makes a specific network request that exploits it, resulting in code execution free from Apple's policies. So that ONT post is a bit short-sighted in thinking bugs that don't result in privilege escalation aren't "security holes."
- mbubb 11y agoCoincidentially I heard about this at a recent talk - is it this: http://www.imore.com/jekyll-apps-how-they-attack-ios-security-and-what-you-need-know-about-them http://www.imore.com/jekyll-apps-how-they-attack-ios-securit... Jekyll apps in App store
- jacobwcarlson 11y agoThat's it, thanks! For anyone wanting to read the paper itself, the link the imore.com article is broken. Use this one instead: http://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity13/sec13-paper_wang-updated-8-23-13.pdf http://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity...
- mikeash 11y agoEvading Apple's policies isn't a security thing, though. What keeps the system secure from malicious activity by your app is the sandbox that your app is executed in. Putting in exploits that you then use yourself is just a weird way of obfuscating your code to bypassing non-security restrictions, and it's one that involves way more effort than is necessary. Much easier and just as effective to embed a small interpreter and make a HTTP request back to your server on launch to see if it has any code for you to run.