Over The Air - Vol. 2, Pt. 2: Exploiting The Wi-Fi Stack on Apple Devices
Summary: Google Project Zero researcher Gal Beniamini reverse-engineered the Broadcom Wi-Fi firmware on the iPhone 7, uncovered several vulnerabilities, and developed a working exploit that achieved code execution on the Wi-Fi chip plus a covert backdoor allowing remote over-the-air control. All five vulnerabilities were reported to Broadcom and fixed, though the firmware lacks ASLR, stack cookies, and safe heap unlinking, and address zero maps to writable interrupt vectors.
What's compelling: The Wi-Fi chip sees all of the host's inbound and outbound traffic and talks to the host over a privileged interface like PCIe, so control of the firmware is a foothold for injecting browser exploits into unencrypted traffic or attacking the host itself. A chip that omits ASLR, stack cookies, and safe heap unlinking turns even null-pointer bugs into code execution.
Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
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