3 ms·

Objective-c has bounds checks and lengths built into NSData, NSArray, and NSString… so many of the buffer overflow techniques likely won’t work against it. Howe

Objective-c has bounds checks and lengths built into NSData, NSArray, and NSString… so many of the buffer overflow techniques likely won’t work against it. However, images and video seem to hit C++ code and from all of the past CVEs it seems this is a giant attack surface over and over again. I’m surprised this code isn’t being rewritten in something like Rust, but perhaps there are more things going on at play, like the plist serialization attacks that end up coding for esoteric classes that contained various bugs.

thenewwazoo 5y ago
As a certified member of the Rewrite It In Rust (RIIR) Reaction Force, let me answer this by saying that it’s very, very hard to get the software right, even the second time, and RIIR trades one set of unknowns for another. There are also a huge number of people who are convinced that Rust is a fad, or that C is good enough, or whatever. The same people who swore they could outbrake ABS decades ago. They do not want to learn a new, hard thing, and Rust can be hard at first.
- raspasov 5y ago
  Haha, love the ABS analogy!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
saagarjha 5y ago
Objective-C can run into other issues, though: NSSecureCoding exists for a reason ;)
- azinman2 5y ago
  Which is why I mention plists
mitemte 5y ago
Depends where the vulnerability lies. Plenty of iMessage DoS attacks [1-4] have targeted CoreText, which, I believe is written in C and CoreFoundation. I think all of these DoS attacks could be mitigated by not viewing the message and disabling message previews in notifications. [1] https://habr.com/ru/post/191654/ https://habr.com/ru/post/191654/ [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/bug-in-ios-notifications-handling-crashes-iphones-with-a-simple-text https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/bug-in-ios-notifi... [3] https://blog.zecops.com/research/analyzing-the-ios-telugu-crash-part-i/ https://blog.zecops.com/research/analyzing-the-ios-telugu-cr... [4] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/09/how-to-fix-black-dot-imessage-crashing-bug/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/09/how-to-fix-black-dot-im...
kalleboo 5y ago
> I’m surprised this code isn’t being rewritten in something like Rust I imagine the internal discussion is something like "by rewriting it, we will just introduce 100 new bugs. once we squash these last few bugs in the current tried-and-tested C code, it will be bulletproof!" Being Apple I imagine they would prefer to rewrite it in Swift, but Swift may not be mature enough

thenewwazoo 5y ago

As a certified member of the Rewrite It In Rust (RIIR) Reaction Force, let me answer this by saying that it’s very, very hard to get the software right, even the second time, and RIIR trades one set of unknowns for another. There are also a huge number of people who are convinced that Rust is a fad, or that C is good enough, or whatever. The same people who swore they could outbrake ABS decades ago. They do not want to learn a new, hard thing, and Rust can be hard at first.

raspasov 5y ago
Haha, love the ABS analogy!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

saagarjha 5y ago

Objective-C can run into other issues, though: NSSecureCoding exists for a reason ;)

azinman2 5y ago
Which is why I mention plists

mitemte 5y ago

Depends where the vulnerability lies. Plenty of iMessage DoS attacks [1-4] have targeted CoreText, which, I believe is written in C and CoreFoundation. I think all of these DoS attacks could be mitigated by not viewing the message and disabling message previews in notifications. [1] https://habr.com/ru/post/191654/ https://habr.com/ru/post/191654/ [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/bug-in-ios-notifications-handling-crashes-iphones-with-a-simple-text https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/bug-in-ios-notifi... [3] https://blog.zecops.com/research/analyzing-the-ios-telugu-crash-part-i/ https://blog.zecops.com/research/analyzing-the-ios-telugu-cr... [4] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/09/how-to-fix-black-dot-imessage-crashing-bug/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/09/how-to-fix-black-dot-im...

kalleboo 5y ago

> I’m surprised this code isn’t being rewritten in something like Rust I imagine the internal discussion is something like "by rewriting it, we will just introduce 100 new bugs. once we squash these last few bugs in the current tried-and-tested C code, it will be bulletproof!" Being Apple I imagine they would prefer to rewrite it in Swift, but Swift may not be mature enough