Cyber Risks · Google Project Zero

In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 2

Summary: Project Zero's Ian Beer documented an in-the-wild iOS exploit chain targeting iOS 10.3 through 10.3.3 on devices from the iPhone 5s through the iPhone 7, built on a kernel bug tracked as CVE-2017-13861. The flaw was in IOSurfaceRootUserClient external method 17 (s_set_surface_notify), which dropped a reference on the wake_port and also returned an error, causing MIG to drop a second reference and producing a use-after-free reachable from inside the MobileSafari renderer sandbox.

Bottom line: The bug was not fixed until iOS 11.2 on December 2nd 2017, and Beer independently discovered and reported it to Apple on October 30th 2017 - after the attackers appear to have stopped using it, with iOS 11 released September 19th 2017 as the first unsupported version. A reference-counting mismatch in a sandbox-reachable IOKit method was enough to hand attackers kernel memory access on devices spanning the iPhone 5s through the iPhone 7.

Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗

Topics
Zero-Days & Exploits
Mentions
CVE-2017-13861
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