I, sadly, did not get a message from a teenage YouTuber earnestly offering to return my stolen phone. Instead I received a series of texts from someone cycling through a number of different strategies for engaging, convincing, tricking or scaring me into unlocking the phone for them.

source: HN

This presentation was also the first time we had publicly disclosed the details of all exploits and vulnerabilities that were used in the attack. We discover and analyze new exploits and attacks using these on a daily basis, and we have discovered and reported more than thirty in-the-wild zero-days in Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft products, but this is definitely the most sophisticated attack chain we have ever seen.

source: HN

Six privilege escalation exploits are bundled with this app. Five are well-known, publicly available N-day exploits for older iOS versions. The sixth is not like those others at all. This blog post is the story of the last exploit and the month-long journey to understand it.

As just one example (unrelated to what follows), their software bundles FFmpeg DLLs that were built in 2012 and have not been updated since then. There have been over a hundred security updates in that time, none of which have been applied.

In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low percentages based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.

The blog post will start with an overview of the major changes Apple implemented in iOS 14 which affect the security of iMessage. Afterwards, and mostly for the readers interested in the technical details, each of the major improvements is described in more detail while also providing a walkthrough of how it was reverse engineered. At least for the technical details, it is recommended to briefly review the blog post series from last year for a basic introduction to iMessage and the exploitation techniques used to attack it.

This approach could apply to any system.

In this work we attempt a full accounting of the current and historical status of smartphone security measures. We focus on several of the most popular device types, and present a complete description of both the available security mechanisms in these devices, as well as a summary of the known public information on the state-of-the-art in bypass techniques for each. Our goal is to provide a single periodically updated guide that serves to detail the public state of data security in modern smartphones.

source: green

For the last several years, nearly all iOS kernel exploits have followed the same high-level flow: memory corruption and fake Mach ports are used to gain access to the kernel task port, which provides an ideal kernel read/write primitive to userspace. Recent iOS kernel exploit mitigations like PAC and zone_require seem geared towards breaking the canonical techniques seen over and over again to achieve this exploit flow. But the fact that so many iOS kernel exploits look identical from a high level begs questions: Is targeting the kernel task port really the best exploit flow? Or has the convergence on this strategy obscured other, perhaps more interesting, techniques? And are existing iOS kernel mitigations equally effective against other, previously unseen exploit flows?

In this blog post, I’ll describe a new iOS kernel exploitation technique that turns a one-byte controlled heap overflow directly into a read/write primitive for arbitrary physical addresses, all while completely sidestepping current mitigations such as KASLR, PAC, and zone_require. By reading a special hardware register, it’s possible to locate the kernel in physical memory and build a kernel read/write primitive without a fake kernel task port. I’ll conclude by discussing how effective various iOS mitigations were or could be at blocking this technique and by musing on the state-of-the-art of iOS kernel exploitation. You can find the proof-of-concept code here.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1986#c7

Related: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-core-of-apple-is-ppl-breaking-xnu.html

While doing research for the one-byte exploit technique, I considered several ways it might be possible to bypass Apple’s Page Protection Layer (PPL) using just a physical address mapping primitive, that is, before obtaining kernel read/write or defeating PAC. Given that PPL is even more privileged than the rest of the XNU kernel, the idea of compromising PPL “before” XNU was appealing. In the end, though, I wasn’t able to think of a way to break PPL using the physical mapping primitive alone.

However, it’s not the Project Zero way to leave any mitigation unbroken. So, having exhausted my search for design flaws, I returned to the ever-faithful technique of memory corruption. Sure enough, decompiling a few PPL functions in IDA was sufficient to find some memory corruption.

I recently found myself wishing for a single online reference providing a brief summary of the high-level exploit flow of every public iOS kernel exploit in recent years; since no such document existed, I decided to create it here.

This post summarizes original iOS kernel exploits from local app context targeting iOS 10 through iOS 13, focusing on the high-level exploit flow from the initial primitive granted by the vulnerability to kernel read/write. At the end of this post, we will briefly look at iOS kernel exploit mitigations (in both hardware and software) and how they map onto the techniques used in the exploits.

If you tried to intercept requests from the Facebook app on iOS using a proxy, you will be hitting by their message alert The operation couldn’t be completed. That’s because of their SSL Certificate Pinning protection which must be bypassed to be able to intercept requests and responses from their server. In this blog, We will go through their iOS app trying to bypass their SSL Pinning.

And the same for instagram: https://www.cyclon3.com/bypass-instagram-ssl-certificate-pinning-for-ios

source: R

Yesterday Apple released iOS 13.5 beta 3 (seemingly renaming iOS 13.4.5 to 13.5 there), and that killed one of my bugs. It wasn’t just any bug though, it was the first 0day I had ever found. And it was probably also the best one. Not necessarily for how much it gives you, but certainly for how much I’ve used it for, and also for how ridiculously simple it is. So simple, in fact, that the PoC I tweeted out looks like an absolute joke. But it’s 100% real.

I dubbed it “psychic paper” because, just like the item by that name that Doctor Who likes to carry, it allows you get past security checks and make others believe you have a wide range of credentials that you shouldn’t have.

source: grugq

The story of how I gained unauthorized Camera access on iOS and macOS

We are beginning to form the attack plan - if we can somehow trick Safari into thinking our evil website is in the “secure context” of a trusted website, we can leverage Safari’s camera permission to access the webcam via the mediaDevices API.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is a privacy mechanism implemented by Apple’s Safari browser, released in October 2017. ITP aims to reduce the cross-site tracking of web users by limiting the capabilities of cookies and other website data. As part of a routine security review, the Information Security Engineering team at Google has identified multiple security and privacy issues in Safari’s ITP design. These issues have a number of unexpected consequences, including the disclosure of the user’s web browsing habits, allowing persistent cross-site tracking, and enabling cross-site information leaks (including cross-site search). This report is a modestly expanded version of our original vulnerability submission to Apple (WebKit bug #201319), providing additional context and edited for clarity. A number of the issues discussed here have been addressed in Safari 13.0.4 and iOS 13.3, released in December 2019.

source: green

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

source: L

Public defenders lack access to gadgets and software that could keep their clients out of jail.

This tech gap has two basic forms. First, law enforcement agencies can use warrants and court orders to compel companies to turn over emails, photos and other communications, but defense lawyers have no such power. And second, the government has access to forensic technology that makes digital investigations easier. Over the last two decades, the machines and software designed to extract data from computers and smartphones were primarily made for and sold to law enforcement.

To successfully defend its clients, the Legal Aid Society, New York City’s largest public defender office, realized in 2013 that it needed to buy the same tools the police had: forensic devices and software from companies including Cellebrite, Magnet Forensics and Guidance Software. Not only does the expensive technology unearth digital evidence that is otherwise hard or impossible to find, it captures it in a format that can hold up in court, as opposed to evidence that could have been tampered with or forged.

source: green

While the kernel has a large amount of userland-reachable functionality, much of this attack surface is not accessible due to sandboxing in iOS. By default, an app is only able to access about 10 drivers’ userclients, which is a relatively small amount of code. Therefore, first escaping the app sandbox can be highly beneficial in order to attack the kernel.

In contrast to the kernel, many daemons running in userland are accessible via the default app sandbox. One such example is a daemon called MIDIServer (com.apple.midiserver). This daemon allows apps and other services to interface with MIDI hardware which may be connected to the device.

source: R

Not only does iVerify help you keep your data confidential and limit data sharing, it helps protect the integrity of your device. It’s normally almost impossible to tell if your iPhone has been hacked, but our app gives you a heads-up. iVerify periodically scans your device for anomalies that might indicate it’s been compromised, gives you a detailed report on what was detected, and provides actionable advice on how to proceed.

source: grugq

Here’s a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI when things are redesigned.

Why didn’t she know there were options further down the share sheet? Because she’s using an iPhone 8, which happens to be just the right height to perfectly crop the share sheet.

source: DF

The usual before and after analysis.

source: DF

checkm8 exploits the Boot ROM to allow anyone with physical control of a phone to run arbitrary code. The Boot ROM, also called the Secure ROM, is the first code that executes when an iPhone is powered on and cannot be changed, because it’s “burned in” to the iPhone’s hardware. The Boot ROM initializes the system and eventually passes control to the kernel. It’s the root of trust for the trusted boot chain of iOS and verifies the integrity of the next stage of the boot process before passing execution control.

Detailed writeup: https://habr.com/en/company/dsec/blog/472762/

source: white