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The scary thing is that even though this sounds like a monstrous effort to pull off this hack, its not out of reach for large governments. Its basically known a
by SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
The scary thing is that even though this sounds like a monstrous effort to pull off this hack, its not out of reach for large governments. Its basically known as a fact they have loads of these exploits sitting in their toolbox ready to use when they have a enticing enough target.
Short of rewriting the whole of iOS in a memory safe language I'm not sure how they could even solve this problem. Assigning a researcher to search for 6 months only to find one bug is financially prohibitive.
- q3k 6y agoThe research would've been much shorter if Apple would actually provide researchers with debug symbols. Or you know, if Apple open sourced their security-critical software. > One of the most time-consuming tasks of this whole project was the painstaking process of reverse engineering the types and meanings of a huge number of the fields in these objects. Each IO80211AWDLPeer object is almost 6KB; that's a lot of potential fields. Having structure layout information would probably have saved months. > Six years ago I had hoped Project Zero would be able to get legitimate access to data sources like this. Six years later and I am still spending months reversing structure layouts and naming variables.
- CharlesW 6y ago> The research would've been much shorter if Apple would actually provide researchers with debug symbols. I believe they're about to do this: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20756629/apple-iphone-security-research-device-program-vulnerabilities https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20756629/apple-iphone-secu...
- q3k 6y agoThese are just phones that you are officially permitted to attach a root shell and kernel debugger to, like to any other device that's not an iPhone. Researchers have been working around that for years by using private jailbreaks / exploits to get similar levels access, and with checkm8/ktrw you yourself can get similar access to any vulnerable iPhone 7/8/X. No sources or structure layout or symbols, so you're still stuck waddling through megabytes of compiled code to reverse-engineer everything from scratch. It's Apple drumming up absolutely nothing, and from my point of view it's mostly a PR stunt.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> It's Apple drumming up absolutely nothing, and from my point of view it's mostly a PR stunt. Well, I don't think it's quite "nothing". Newer phones don't have access to checkm8, and getting a private jailbreak or exploit working can be non-trivial. And in some cases, researchers may need to avoid reporting that exploit to Apple in order to keep using it. It's a good step. It's just not sufficient, especially given all the other restrictions.
- q3k 6y ago> And in some cases, researchers may need to avoid reporting that exploit to Apple in order to keep using it. And this will continue to happen until Apple just starts selling the damn things to anyone who wants them, instead of trying to gatekeep them to people who are playing by their ridiculous security disclosure rules.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoRight! It would solve so many issues! Put them on an unlisted page of your online store, charge a 50% markup over a normal iPhone, make the boot screen bright red, and do something ugly and obvious with the phone's exterior. Sure, some crazy people who aren't security researchers will probably buy them too and use them as daily drivers (I'd probably be one of them). So what? I don't understand why Apple feels the need to hold this stuff so close to their chest. Everyone in this scenario knows exactly what they're buying.
- CharlesW 6y ago> No sources or structure layout or symbols… Oh, that's a shame. The slide in the referenced tweet says, "advanced debug capabilities", so I'd assumed that's what it meant. I wonder what else that could mean?
- saagarjha 6y agoThe ability to attach a debugger to the kernel. No, really, that’s “advanced” for an iOS device, because normally you don’t get to do anything even close to that. You can’t even debug userspace processes that aren’t ones that you put there yourself (as a developer writing apps) on normal iPhones.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoAnd Google Project Zero won't get them. https://twitter.com/benhawkes/status/1286021329246801921 https://twitter.com/benhawkes/status/1286021329246801921 > It looks like we won't be able to use the Apple "Security Research Device" due to the vulnerability disclosure restrictions, which seem specifically designed to exclude Project Zero and other researchers who use a 90 day policy.
- ASalazarMX 6y agoGoddammit, 90 day policy and reasonable rewards would strengthen their security and gain the trust of their advanced users. For some reason this ridiculous restriction reminds me when Apple sued Samsung because their phones had round corners.
- ethbr0 6y agoApple sued Samsung because Samsung had aspirations of being Apple. Rounded corners are the after-the-strategic-decision legal justification.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoFrankly, I think Apple sued Samsung because Steve Jobs was still CEO at the time, and he sometimes acted emotionally instead of rationally.
- sneak 6y agoAdvanced users that want a secure device require devices that can be reinitialized to a known state without external input. This is no longer possible on any phone, tablet, or computer Apple sells: all require online activation with device-specific info. There is no way to put the device back into a known state offline or without Apple having an opportunity to tamper with it (or be forced to tamper with it).
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> This is no longer possible on any phone, tablet, or computer Apple sells It is still possible on all of their computers, just not their phones or tablets. Intel Macs (which are still being sold in large numbers) can always be wiped and restored from USB without an internet connection, and Apple Silicon Macs can do it if you set the boot-loader to "Reduced Security" mode.
- callesgg 6y agoHe could just have sent in a bug report. Said that the length was not validated. No need to dig so much if you just want to fix the problem. But he wanted to prove something. That is a different thing.
- q3k 6y agoBy 'wanting to prove something', he caused the vendor to act urgently, instead of sweeping this as a maybe-exploitable-maybe-not bug that would get lazily patched whenever. By 'wanting to prove something', he showed the shortcomings of multiple security mitigations, all defeated by simple bugs. By 'wanting to prove something', he also discovered two other exploitable 0days, that wouldn't have been discovered otherwise. Those 0days were likely already in the hands of bad actors, too. Finally, the reason he even discovered the original bug is because Apple accidentally once or twice forgot to strip function names from a binary. If this didn't happen, that bug very likely would still be out there in the wild. I'm not sure you understand how security research works.
- saagarjha 6y agoIt’s intensely frustrating, because for some reason Apple thinks it’s a good idea to strip out security code from the source that they do release (months late), and they tend to strip (and until recently, encrypt) kernel code. This is what a company from the last decade might do to hide security issues, except it’s coming from the world’s largest company with a highly skilled security team. Is there some old-school manager with so much influence that they’re able to override any calls from internal and external sources? It’s gotten to the point where Apple engineers privately brag about their new proprietary security mitigations after researchers who scrounge for accidentally symbolicated kernels (thank you, iOS 14 beta) do the work to find them. Why does this situation exist?
- bun_at_work 6y agoI can only speculate, but Apple seems to have very tightly coupled software and hardware. Since this coupling probably holds trade secrets (which we don't know about by definition), it seems likely to me that they are controlling access to as much of the stack as they can while still protecting those secrets.
- saagarjha 6y agoYes, but that doesn’t really make sense for things they have already shipped: researchers have to reverse engineer those for what seems like no reason. For example, the newest iPhones have entirely custom privilege levels that are lateral to the typical ARM exception levels and entered using proprietary instructions that their own silicon understands. This is something you can find if you load the kernel into a disassembler and poke at it a bit. But Apple doesn’t mention it at all or document it…what’s the point? Why put up such petty barriers in the face of people trying to audit this?
- richardwhiuk 6y agoLikely the documentation that does exist internal would take a relatively large amount of cost to extract without pulling other stuff with it.
- suifbwish 6y agoBelieve it or not, open sourcing the security code is actually not a great idea. Most of the worlds bot nets run on Wordpress which is open source. Most of the time legitimate actors are not going to read through an entire code base because they have better things to do. Illegitimate actors however have a very high incentive to read through a widely used public code base and do so.
- Shared404 6y agoOpenBSD [0] is OSS, practices full disclosure, and is considered highly secure by... everyone. Wordpress is a mess, but being OSS does not inherently make something less secure. [0] https://www.openbsd.org/security.html https://www.openbsd.org/security.html
- scarybeast 6y agoI'd personally phrase things a bit differently: an _individual_ was able to pull this off while surrounded by screaming children. A large government, with all its resources and hundreds+ of people, would pull this off regularly and without breaking a sweat.
- Moosdijk 6y ago>Its basically known as a fact they have loads of these exploits sitting in their toolbox ready to use when they have a enticing enough target. Do you have a source for this?
- heavyset_go 6y agoThere's a market for exploits that pays pretty well. Someone is throwing millions of dollars at them, and from what we can glean from investigations, leaks and whistle blowers, it's states that are buying them. One company in that space made world-wide news[1] by selling to governments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team
- Shared404 6y ago>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team Also a good idea to DDG Phineas Phisher. You should turn up an interesting read on pastebin iirc. Edit: found it on exploit-db [0] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915 https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915
- b06tmm 6y agoFirst time I've seen "DDG", well done.
- Shared404 6y agoThanks! I realized a while ago that I don't use google, so why should I recommend it to others, even in passing.
- cambalache 6y agoOK. But you should have said Bing
- 6y ago
- Veserv 6y agoIt is not just not out of reach for large governments, it probably not even out of reach for most organizations with between 5-10 people. As the author says, 6 months of "one person, working alone in their bedroom, was able to build a capability which would allow them to seriously compromise iPhone users they'd come into close contact with". Even if we assume the author is paid $1,000,000 a year that is still only $500,000 of funding which is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to most businesses. The average small business loan is more than that at $633,000 [1]. Hell, a single McDonalds restaurant [2] costs more than that to setup. In fact, it is not even out of the reach of vast numbers of individuals. Using the net worth percentiles in the US [3], $500,000 is only the 80th percentile of household net worth. That means in the US alone, which has 129 million households, there are literally 25.8 million households with the resources to bankroll such an effort (assuming they were willing to liquidate their net worth). You need to increase the cost by 1,000x to 10,000x before you get a point where it is out of reach for anybody except for large governments and you need to increase the cost by 100,000x to 1,000,000x before it actually becomes infeasible for any government to bankroll such attacks. tl;dr It is way worse than you say. Every government can fund such an effort. Every Fortune 500 company can fund such an effort. Every multinational can fund such an effort. Probably ~50% of small businesses can fund such an effort. ~20% of people in the US can fund such an effort. The costs of these attacks aren't rookie numbers, they are baby numbers. [1] https://www.fundera.com/business-loans/guides/average-small-business-loan-amount https://www.fundera.com/business-loans/guides/average-small-... [2] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-us/franchising/new-restaurants.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-us/franchising/new-... [3] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
- heavyset_go 6y agoFor those who don't see why a company would want to use such exploits, consider how valuable it would be to know if a company's employees were planning to organize or strike. There are also paranoid people in positions of power, and bureaucracies that can justify spying on employees. One of the interesting things about this lockdown was finding out that many companies put spyware on their employee-issued computers to monitor their usage.
- est31 6y ago> Short of rewriting the whole of iOS in a memory safe language I'm not sure how they could even solve this problem. Assigning a researcher to search for 6 months only to find one bug is financially prohibitive. Note that memory safe languages won't solve security. They only eliminate a class of security bugs, which would be amazing progress, but not all of them.
- brundolf 6y agoThe OP sounds like it was a memory-safety bug, so this is a bit pedantic.
- tptacek 6y agoThis is a weird statement, since the premise of this blog post is that these kinds of attacks aren't out of reach for a single talented researcher on a Google salary. It's not out of reach for any government. Nauru, Grenada, Tonga, the Comoros --- they can all afford this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Thorrez 6y agoI believe the point of SulfurHexaFluri's final sentence is that it is cost prohibitive for Apple to dedicate a bunch of employees to search for bugs in order to fix them all. That is, it's cost-effective to find 1 bug, but not to find all of them. The sentence could have been worded better.
- grishka 6y agoDidn't they move WiFi drivers, among other things, into the userspace in macOS Big Sur? I've heard somewhere that they're going in the direction towards microkernel for this particular reason of reducing the attack surface. (yes I know I'm talking about macOS but the vulnerability was found in iOS, but there's a lot of shared code between them, especially on levels this low)
- allie1 6y agoHow is it financially prohibitive to pay a researcher a salary to find a 0day like this, where the bounty programs pay $100k-$500k on 0days on the same ? source: https://developer.apple.com/security-bounty/payouts/ https://developer.apple.com/security-bounty/payouts/