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Memory integrity enforcement added to the iPhone 17 range is probably going to be huge for preventing future exploits. At risk people should probably also enabl

Memory integrity enforcement added to the iPhone 17 range is probably going to be huge for preventing future exploits. At risk people should probably also enable lockdown mode.

bigyabai 1y ago
Blastdoor was also supposed to be "huge" for preventing future exploits. Worked great up until NSO Group developed FORCEDENTRY.
- commandersaki 1y ago
  MIE eliminates a whole class of bugs (memory corruption) and has demonstrated that it stops full chains but also renders them unusable if parts get swapped out. See: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement... And some interesting excerpts: Both approaches revealed the same conclusion: Memory Integrity Enforcement vastly reduces the exploitation strategies available to attackers. Though memory corruption bugs are usually interchangeable, MIE cut off so many exploit steps at a fundamental level that it was not possible to restore the chains by swapping in new bugs. Even with substantial effort, we could not rebuild any of these chains to work around MIE. The few memory corruption effects that remained are unreliable and don’t give attackers sufficient momentum to successfully exploit these bugs. Notably, attackers confront Memory Integrity Enforcement early in the exploitation process. Although some issues are able to survive MIE — for example, intra-allocation buffer overflows — such issues are extremely rare, and even fewer will lend themselves to a full end-to-end exploit. Inevitably, attackers must face MIE at a stage where their capabilities are still very limited, leaving few viable avenues for exploitation. This leads to fragile chains where breaking just one step is often enough to invalidate the entire exploit strategy. When that happens, most of the chain’s components can’t be reused, and the attackers have to restart exploit development with entirely new bugs.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    [dead]
- Gigachad 1y ago
  MIE is preventing an entire exploit category permanently. Blastdoor is just being more careful in a specific area of the code. It's also not just a case of is it possible to exploit or not, but how much does it cost to develop an exploit, and how long do they last for. If it costs you millions of dollars for an exploit that gets patched a week after it's deployed, you can't use that for mass surveillance. If it costs you hundreds of millions, you can hardly use it for targeted attacks either. The cost of exploiting phones is constantly going up. It used to be within the ability of a single hobbyist developing a jailbreak. Now it's only in reach of the most well funded hacking groups for highly targeted attacks.

Memory integrity enforcement added to the iPhone 17 range is probably going to be huge for preventing future exploits. At risk people should probably also enable lockdown mode.

bigyabai 1y ago

Blastdoor was also supposed to be "huge" for preventing future exploits. Worked great up until NSO Group developed FORCEDENTRY.

commandersaki 1y ago
MIE eliminates a whole class of bugs (memory corruption) and has demonstrated that it stops full chains but also renders them unusable if parts get swapped out. See: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/ https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement... And some interesting excerpts: Both approaches revealed the same conclusion: Memory Integrity Enforcement vastly reduces the exploitation strategies available to attackers. Though memory corruption bugs are usually interchangeable, MIE cut off so many exploit steps at a fundamental level that it was not possible to restore the chains by swapping in new bugs. Even with substantial effort, we could not rebuild any of these chains to work around MIE. The few memory corruption effects that remained are unreliable and don’t give attackers sufficient momentum to successfully exploit these bugs. Notably, attackers confront Memory Integrity Enforcement early in the exploitation process. Although some issues are able to survive MIE — for example, intra-allocation buffer overflows — such issues are extremely rare, and even fewer will lend themselves to a full end-to-end exploit. Inevitably, attackers must face MIE at a stage where their capabilities are still very limited, leaving few viable avenues for exploitation. This leads to fragile chains where breaking just one step is often enough to invalidate the entire exploit strategy. When that happens, most of the chain’s components can’t be reused, and the attackers have to restart exploit development with entirely new bugs.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  [dead]
Gigachad 1y ago
MIE is preventing an entire exploit category permanently. Blastdoor is just being more careful in a specific area of the code. It's also not just a case of is it possible to exploit or not, but how much does it cost to develop an exploit, and how long do they last for. If it costs you millions of dollars for an exploit that gets patched a week after it's deployed, you can't use that for mass surveillance. If it costs you hundreds of millions, you can hardly use it for targeted attacks either. The cost of exploiting phones is constantly going up. It used to be within the ability of a single hobbyist developing a jailbreak. Now it's only in reach of the most well funded hacking groups for highly targeted attacks.