Entries Tagged "iPhone"

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Zero-Click Exploit in iPhones

Make sure you update your iPhones:

Citizen Lab says two zero-days fixed by Apple today in emergency security updates were actively abused as part of a zero-click exploit chain (dubbed BLASTPASS) to deploy NSO Group’s Pegasus commercial spyware onto fully patched iPhones.

The two bugs, tracked as CVE-2023-41064 and CVE-2023-41061, allowed the attackers to infect a fully-patched iPhone running iOS 16.6 and belonging to a Washington DC-based civil society organization via PassKit attachments containing malicious images.

“We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” Citizen Lab said.

“The exploit involved PassKit attachments containing malicious images sent from an attacker iMessage account to the victim.”

Posted on September 13, 2023 at 7:13 AM • View Comments

Operation Triangulation: Zero-Click iPhone Malware

Kaspersky is reporting a zero-click iOS exploit in the wild:

Mobile device backups contain a partial copy of the filesystem, including some of the user data and service databases. The timestamps of the files, folders and the database records allow to roughly reconstruct the events happening to the device. The mvt-ios utility produces a sorted timeline of events into a file called “timeline.csv,” similar to a super-timeline used by conventional digital forensic tools.

Using this timeline, we were able to identify specific artifacts that indicate the compromise. This allowed to move the research forward, and to reconstruct the general infection sequence:

  • The target iOS device receives a message via the iMessage service, with an attachment containing an exploit.
  • Without any user interaction, the message triggers a vulnerability that leads to code execution.
  • The code within the exploit downloads several subsequent stages from the C&C server, that include additional exploits for privilege escalation.
  • After successful exploitation, a final payload is downloaded from the C&C server, that is a fully-featured APT platform.
  • The initial message and the exploit in the attachment is deleted

The malicious toolset does not support persistence, most likely due to the limitations of the OS. The timelines of multiple devices indicate that they may be reinfected after rebooting. The oldest traces of infection that we discovered happened in 2019. As of the time of writing in June 2023, the attack is ongoing, and the most recent version of the devices successfully targeted is iOS 15.7.

No attribution as of yet.

Posted on June 9, 2023 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

Using the iPhone Recovery Key to Lock Owners Out of Their iPhones

This a good example of a security feature that can sometimes harm security:

Apple introduced the optional recovery key in 2020 to protect users from online hackers. Users who turn on the recovery key, a unique 28-digit code, must provide it when they want to reset their Apple ID password.

iPhone thieves with your passcode can flip on the recovery key and lock you out. And if you already have the recovery key enabled, they can easily generate a new one, which also locks you out.

Apple’s policy gives users virtually no way back into their accounts without that recovery key. For now, a stolen iPhone could mean devastating personal losses.

It’s actually a complicated crime. The criminal first watches their victim type in their passcode and then grabs the phone out of their hands. In the basic mode of this attack, they have a few hours to use the phone—trying to access bank accounts, etc.—before the owner figures out how to shut the attacker out. With the addition of the recovery key, the attacker can shut the owner out—for a long time.

The goal of the recovery key was to defend against SIM swapping, which is a much more common crime. But this spy-and-grab attack has become more common, and the recovery key makes it much more devastating.

Defenses are few: choose a long, complex passcode. Or set parental controls in a way that further secure the device. The obvious fix is for Apple to redesign its recovery system.

There are other, less privacy-compromising methods Apple could still rely on in lieu of a recovery key.

If someone takes over your Google account, Google’s password-reset process lets you provide a recovery email, phone number or account password, and you can use them to regain access later, even if a hijacker changes them.

Going through the process on a familiar Wi-Fi network or location can also help demonstrate you’re who you say you are.

Or how about an eight-hour delay before the recovery key can be changed?

This not an easy thing to design for, but we have to get this right as phones become the single point of control for our lives.

Posted on April 21, 2023 at 10:19 AM • View Comments

New Zero-Click Exploits against iOS

Citizen Lab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched.

One interesting bit is that Apple’s Lockdown Mode (part of iOS 16) seems to have worked to prevent infection.

News article.

EDITED TO ADD (4/21): News article. Good Twitter thread.

Posted on April 20, 2023 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process.

I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318):

My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into people’s houses by cutting a hole in their walls with a chainsaw. The attacker completely bypassed the threat model of the defender. The countermeasures that the homeowner put in place were door and window alarms; they didn’t make a difference to this attack.

The article says they took half a million dollars worth of iPhones. I don’t understand iPhone device security, but don’t they have a system of denying stolen phones access to the network?

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): A commenter says: “Locked idevices will still sell for 40-60% of their value on eBay and co, they will go to Chinese shops to be stripped for parts. A aftermarket ‘oem-quality’ iPhone 14 display is $400+ alone on ifixit.”

Posted on April 13, 2023 at 7:22 AM • View Comments

Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls

They’re using commercial phones, which go through the Ukrainian telecom network:

“You still have a lot of soldiers bringing cellphones to the frontline who want to talk to their families and they are either being intercepted as they go through a Ukrainian telecommunications provider or intercepted over the air,” said Alperovitch. “That doesn’t pose too much difficulty for the Ukrainian security services.”

[…]

“Security has always been a mess, both in the army and among defence officials,” the source said. “For example, in 2013 they tried to get all the staff at the ministry of defence to replace our iPhones with Russian-made Yoto smartphones.

“But everyone just kept using the iPhone as a second mobile because it was much better. We would just keep the iPhone in the car’s glove compartment for when we got back from work. In the end, the ministry gave up and stopped caring. If the top doesn’t take security very seriously, how can you expect any discipline in the regular army?”

This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a Russian problem. Here’s a more general article on the problem from 2020.

Posted on December 21, 2022 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Apple Patches iPhone Zero-Day

The most recent iPhone update—to version 16.2—patches a zero-day vulnerability that “may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.1.”

News:

Apple said security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates nation state-backed spyware, hacking and cyberattacks, discovered and reported the WebKit bug.

WebKit bugs are often exploited when a person visits a malicious domain in their browser (or via the in-app browser). It’s not uncommon for bad actors to find vulnerabilities that target WebKit as a way to break into the device’s operating system and the user’s private data. WebKit bugs can be “chained” to other vulnerabilities to break through multiple layers of a device’s defenses.

Posted on December 16, 2022 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off

Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down.

t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip­—which is key to making features like Find My work­—has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt figured out how to exploit this lack of hardening to run malicious firmware that allows the attacker to track the phone’s location or run new features when the device is turned off.

[…]

The research is the first—or at least among the first—to study the risk posed by chips running in low-power mode. Not to be confused with iOS’s low-power mode for conserving battery life, the low-power mode (LPM) in this research allows chips responsible for near-field communication, ultra wideband, and Bluetooth to run in a special mode that can remain on for 24 hours after a device is turned off.

The research is fascinating, but the attack isn’t really feasible. It requires a jailbroken phone, which is hard to pull off in an adversarial setting.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on May 18, 2022 at 6:06 AM • View Comments

Bypassing Apple’s AirTag Security

A Berlin-based company has developed an AirTag clone that bypasses Apple’s anti-stalker security systems. Source code for these AirTag clones is available online.

So now we have several problems with the system. Apple’s anti-stalker security only works with iPhones. (Apple wrote an Android app that can detect AirTags, but how many people are going to download it?) And now non-AirTags can piggyback on Apple’s system without triggering the alarms.

Apple didn’t think this through nearly as well as it claims to have. I think the general problem is one that I have written about before: designers just don’t have intimate threats in mind when building these systems.

Posted on February 23, 2022 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.