Tag Archives: iPhone

Zero-Click Exploit in iPhones

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/zero-click-exploit-in-iphones.html

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.”

Operation Triangulation: Zero-Click iPhone Malware

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/operation-triangulation-zero-click-iphone-malware.html

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.

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

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/04/using-the-iphone-recovery-key-to-lock-owners-out-of-their-iphones.html

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.

New Zero-Click Exploits against iOS

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/04/new-zero-click-exploits-against-ios.html

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.

Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/04/bypassing-a-theft-threat-model.html

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.”

Ukraine Intercepting Russian Soldiers’ Cell Phone Calls

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/ukraine-intercepting-russian-soldiers-cell-phone-calls.html

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.

Apple Patches iPhone Zero-Day

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/apple-patches-iphone-zero-day.html

The most recent iPhone update—to version 16.1.2—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.

iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/iphone-malware-that-operates-even-when-the-phone-is-turned-off.html

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.

Bypassing Apple’s AirTag Security

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/bypassing-apples-airtag-security.html

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.

Faking an iPhone Reboot

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/faking-an-iphone-reboot.html

Researchers have figured how how to intercept and fake an iPhone reboot:

We’ll dissect the iOS system and show how it’s possible to alter a shutdown event, tricking a user that got infected into thinking that the phone has been powered off, but in fact, it’s still running. The “NoReboot” approach simulates a real shutdown. The user cannot feel a difference between a real shutdown and a “fake shutdown.” There is no user-interface or any button feedback until the user turns the phone back “on.”

It’s a complicated hack, but it works.

Uses are obvious:

Historically, when malware infects an iOS device, it can be removed simply by restarting the device, which clears the malware from memory.

However, this technique hooks the shutdown and reboot routines to prevent them from ever happening, allowing malware to achieve persistence as the device is never actually turned off.

I see this as another manifestation of the security problems that stem from all controls becoming software controls. Back when the physical buttons actually did things — like turn the power, the Wi-Fi, or the camera on and off — you could actually know that something was on or off. Now that software controls those functions, you can never be sure.

Testing Faraday Cages

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/12/testing-faraday-cages.html

Matt Blaze tested a variety of Faraday cages for phones, both commercial and homemade.

The bottom line:

A quick and likely reliable “go/no go test” can be done with an Apple AirTag and an iPhone: drop the AirTag in the bag under test, and see if the phone can locate it and activate its alarm (beware of caching in the FindMy app when doing this).

This test won’t tell you the exact attenuation level, of course, but it will tell you if the attenuation is sufficient for most practical purposes. It can also detect whether an otherwise good bag has been damaged and compromised.

At least in the frequency ranges I tested, two commercial Faraday pouches (the EDEC OffGrid and Mission Darkness Window pouches) yielded excellent performance sufficient to provide assurance of signal isolation under most real-world circumstances. None of the makeshift solutions consistently did nearly as well, although aluminum foil can, under ideal circumstances (that are difficult to replicate) sometimes provide comparable levels of attenuation.

Zero-Click iPhone Exploits

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/09/zero-click-iphone-exploits.html

Citizen Lab is reporting on two zero-click iMessage exploits, in spyware sold by the cyberweapons arms manufacturer NSO Group to the Bahraini government.

These are particularly scary exploits, since they don’t require to victim to do anything, like click on a link or open a file. The victim receives a text message, and then they are hacked.

More on this here.

Apple’s NeuralHash Algorithm Has Been Reverse-Engineered

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/08/apples-neuralhash-algorithm-has-been-reverse-engineered.html

Apple’s NeuralHash algorithm — the one it’s using for client-side scanning on the iPhone — has been reverse-engineered.

Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed:

Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations.

We also have the first collision: two images that hash to the same value.

The next step is to generate innocuous images that NeuralHash classifies as prohibited content.

This was a bad idea from the start, and Apple never seemed to consider the adversarial context of the system as a whole, and not just the cryptography.

New iMessage Security Features

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/new-imessage-security-features.html

Apple has added added security features to mitigate the risk of zero-click iMessage attacks.

Apple did not document the changes but Groß said he fiddled around with the newest iOS 14 and found that Apple shipped a “significant refactoring of iMessage processing” that severely cripples the usual ways exploits are chained together for zero-click attacks.

Groß notes that memory corruption based zero-click exploits typically require exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities to create exploit chains. In most observed attacks, these could include a memory corruption vulnerability, reachable without user interaction and ideally without triggering any user notifications; a way to break ASLR remotely; a way to turn the vulnerability into remote code execution;; and a way to break out of any sandbox, typically by exploiting a separate vulnerability in another operating system component (e.g. a userspace service or the kernel).

Impressive iPhone Exploit

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/impressive-iphone-exploit.html

This is a scarily impressive vulnerability:

Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device­ — over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable­ — meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed.

[…]

Beer’s attack worked by exploiting a buffer overflow bug in a driver for AWDL, an Apple-proprietary mesh networking protocol that makes things like Airdrop work. Because drivers reside in the kernel — ­one of the most privileged parts of any operating system­ — the AWDL flaw had the potential for serious hacks. And because AWDL parses Wi-Fi packets, exploits can be transmitted over the air, with no indication that anything is amiss.

[…]

Beer developed several different exploits. The most advanced one installs an implant that has full access to the user’s personal data, including emails, photos, messages, and passwords and crypto keys stored in the keychain. The attack uses a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, and some off-the-shelf Wi-Fi adapters. It takes about two minutes to install the prototype implant, but Beer said that with more work a better written exploit could deliver it in a “handful of seconds.” Exploits work only on devices that are within Wi-Fi range of the attacker.

There is no evidence that this vulnerability was ever used in the wild.

EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread.

New Bluetooth Vulnerability

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/09/new-bluetooth-vulnerability.html

There’s a new unpatched Bluetooth vulnerability:

The issue is with a protocol called Cross-Transport Key Derivation (or CTKD, for short). When, say, an iPhone is getting ready to pair up with Bluetooth-powered device, CTKD’s role is to set up two separate authentication keys for that phone: one for a “Bluetooth Low Energy” device, and one for a device using what’s known as the “Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate” standard. Different devices require different amounts of data — and battery power — from a phone. Being able to toggle between the standards needed for Bluetooth devices that take a ton of data (like a Chromecast), and those that require a bit less (like a smartwatch) is more efficient. Incidentally, it might also be less secure.

According to the researchers, if a phone supports both of those standards but doesn’t require some sort of authentication or permission on the user’s end, a hackery sort who’s within Bluetooth range can use its CTKD connection to derive its own competing key. With that connection, according to the researchers, this sort of erzatz authentication can also allow bad actors to weaken the encryption that these keys use in the first place — which can open its owner up to more attacks further down the road, or perform “man in the middle” style attacks that snoop on unprotected data being sent by the phone’s apps and services.

Another article:

Patches are not immediately available at the time of writing. The only way to protect against BLURtooth attacks is to control the environment in which Bluetooth devices are paired, in order to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, or pairings with rogue devices carried out via social engineering (tricking the human operator).

However, patches are expected to be available at one point. When they’ll be, they’ll most likely be integrated as firmware or operating system updates for Bluetooth capable devices.

The timeline for these updates is, for the moment, unclear, as device vendors and OS makers usually work on different timelines, and some may not prioritize security patches as others. The number of vulnerable devices is also unclear and hard to quantify.

Many Bluetooth devices can’t be patched.

Final note: this seems to be another example of simultaneous discovery:

According to the Bluetooth SIG, the BLURtooth attack was discovered independently by two groups of academics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Purdue University.