Apr 11, 2024NewsroomSpyware / Cyber Espionage

Apple on Wednesday revised its documentation pertaining to its mercenary spyware threat notification system to mention that it alerts users when they may have been individually targeted by such attacks.

It also specifically called out companies like NSO Group for developing commercial surveillance tools such as Pegasus that are used by state actors to pull off “individually targeted attacks of such exceptional cost and complexity.”

“Though deployed against a very small number of individuals — often journalists, activists, politicians, and diplomats — mercenary spyware attacks are ongoing and global,” Apple said.

“The extreme cost, sophistication, and worldwide nature of mercenary spyware attacks makes them some of the most advanced digital threats in existence today.”

The update marks a change in wording that previously said these “threat notifications” are designed to inform and assist users who may have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers.

According to TechCrunch, Apple is said to have sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries at 12:00 p.m. PST on Wednesday coinciding with the revision to the support page.

It’s worth noting that Apple began sending threat notifications to warn users it believes have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers starting November 2021.

However, the company also makes it a point to emphasize that it does not “attribute the attacks or resulting threat notifications” to any particular threat actor or geographical region.

The development comes amid continued efforts by governments around the world to counter the misuse and proliferation of commercial spyware.

Last month, the U.S. government said Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, and South Korea had joined an inaugural group of 11 countries working to develop safeguards against the abuse of invasive surveillance technology.

“Commercial spyware has been misused across the world by authoritarian regimes and in democracies […] without proper legal authorization, safeguards, or oversight,” the governments said in a joint statement.

“The misuse of these tools presents significant and growing risks to our national security, including to the safety and security of our government personnel, information, and information systems.”

According to a recent report published by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant, commercial surveillance vendors were behind the in-the-wild exploitation of a chunk of the 97 zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in 2023.

All the vulnerabilities attributed to spyware companies targeted web browsers – particularly flaws in third-party libraries that affect more than one browser and substantially increase the attack surface – and mobile devices running Android and iOS.

“Private sector firms have been involved in discovering and selling exploits for many years, but we have observed a notable increase in exploitation driven by these actors over the past several years,” the tech giant said.

“Threat actors are increasingly leveraging zero-days, often for the purposes of evasion and persistence, and we don’t expect this activity to decrease anytime soon.”

Google also said that increased security investments into exploit mitigations are affecting the types of vulnerabilities threat actors can weaponize in their attacks, forcing them to bypass several security guardrails (e.g., Lockdown Mode and MiraclePtr) to infiltrate target devices.

A new security shortcoming discovered in Apple M-series chips could be exploited to extract secret keys used during cryptographic operations.

Dubbed GoFetch, the vulnerability relates to a microarchitectural side-channel attack that takes advantage of a feature known as data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP) to target constant-time cryptographic implementations and capture sensitive data from the CPU cache. Apple was made aware of the findings in December 2023.

Prefetchers are a hardware optimization technique that predicts what memory addresses a currently running program will access in the near future and retrieve the data into the cache accordingly from the main memory. The goal of this approach is to reduce the program’s memory access latency.

DMP is a type of prefetcher that takes into account the contents of memory based on previously observed access patterns when determining what to prefetch. This behavior makes it ripe for cache-based attacks that trick the prefetcher into revealing the contents associated with a victim process that should be otherwise inaccessible.

GoFetch also builds on the foundations of another microarchitectural attack called Augury that employs DMP to leak data speculatively.

“DMP activates (and attempts to dereference) data loaded from memory that ‘looks like’ a pointer,” a team of seven academics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, University of Washington, and Carnegie Mellon University said.

“This explicitly violates a requirement of the constant-time programming paradigm, which forbids mixing data and memory access patterns.”

Like other attacks of this kind, the setup requires that the victim and attacker have two different processes co-located on the same machine and on the same CPU cluster. Specifically, the threat actor could lure a target into downloading a malicious app that exploits GoFetch.

What’s more, while the attacker and the victim do not share memory, the attacker can monitor any microarchitectural side channels available to it, e.g., cache latency.

GoFetch, in a nutshell, demonstrates that “even if a victim correctly separates data from addresses by following the constant-time paradigm, the DMP will generate secret-dependent memory access on the victim’s behalf,” rendering it susceptible to key-extraction attacks.

In other words, an attacker could weaponize the prefetcher to influence the data being prefetched, thus opening the door to accessing sensitive data. The vulnerability has serious implications in that it completely nullifies the security protections offered by constant-time programming against timing side-channel attacks.

“GoFetch shows that the DMP is significantly more aggressive than previously thought and thus poses a much greater security risk,” the researchers noted.

The fundamental nature of the flaw means that it cannot be fixed in existing Apple CPUs, requiring that developers of cryptographic libraries take steps to prevent conditions that allow GoFetch to succeed, something that could also introduce a performance hit. Users, on the other hand, are urged to keep their systems up-to-date.

On Apple M3 chips, however, enabling data-independent timing (DIT) has been found to disable DMP. This is not possible on M1 and M2 processors.

“Apple silicon provides data-independent timing (DIT), in which the processor completes certain instructions in a constant amount of time,” Apple notes in its documentation. “With DIT enabled, the processor uses the longer, worst-case amount of time to complete the instruction, regardless of the input data.”

The iPhone maker also emphasized that although turning on DIT prevents timing-based leakage, developers are recommended to adhere to “avoid conditional branches and memory access locations based on the value of the secret data” in order to effectively block an adversary from inferring secret by keeping tabs on the processor’s microarchitectural state.

The development comes as another group of researchers from the Graz University of Technology in Austria and the University of Rennes in France demonstrated a new graphics processing unit (GPU) attack affecting popular browsers and graphics cards that leverages specially crafted JavaScript code in a website to infer sensitive information such as passwords.

The technique, which requires no user interaction, has been described as the first GPU cache side-channel attack from within the browser.

“Since GPU computing can also offer advantages for computations within websites, browser vendors decided to expose the GPU to JavaScript through APIs like WebGL and the upcoming WebGPU standard,” the researchers said.

“Despite the inherent restrictions of the JavaScript and WebGPU environment, we construct new attack primitives enabling cache side-channel attacks with an effectiveness comparable to traditional CPU-based attacks.”

A threat actor could weaponize it by means of a drive-by attack, allowing for the extraction of AES keys or mining cryptocurrencies as users browse the internet. It impacts all operating systems and browsers implementing the WebGPU standard, as well as a broad range of GPU devices.

As countermeasures, the researchers propose treating access to the host system’s graphics card via the browser as a sensitive resource, requiring websites to seek users permission (like in the case of camera or microphone) before use.

Mar 22, 2024NewsroomPrivacy / Encryption

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), along with 16 other state and district attorneys general, on Thursday accused Apple of illegally maintaining a monopoly over smartphones, thereby undermining, among others, security and privacy of users when messaging non-iPhone users.

“Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct,” the landmark antitrust lawsuit said. “Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.”

“Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest – such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available.”

The sprawling complaint also alleged that iPhone users who message a non-iPhone user via the Messages app are defaulted to the less secure SMS format (as opposed to iMessage) that lacks support for encryption and offers limited functionality. On the other hand, iMessage is end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) and is even quantum-resistant.

It’s worth noting at this stage that iMessage is only available on the iPhone and other Apple devices. Apple has repeatedly said it has no plans of making iMessage interoperable with Android, even stating that doing so will “will hurt us more than help us.”

Furthermore, the 88-page lawsuit called out the iPhone maker for blocking attempts by third-parties to bring secure cross-platform messaging experience between iOS and Android platform.

In December 2023, Beeper managed to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol and port the service to Android through a dedicated client called Beeper Mini. Apple, however, has shut down those efforts, arguing that Beeper “posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”

These limitations have a powerful network effect, driving consumers to continue buying iPhones and less likely to switch to a competing device, the DoJ said, adding, “by rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.”

The development comes as Apple is facing more scrutiny than ever to open up its tightly-controlled software ecosystem — the so-called “walled garden” — which regulators say locks in customers and developers. Other major tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all dealt with similar lawsuits in recent years.

Apple, in a surprise move late last year, announced that it intends to add support for Communication Services (RCS) – an upgraded version of the SMS standard with modern instant messaging features – to its Messages app. It also said it will work with the GSMA members to integrate encryption.

In response to the lawsuit, Cupertino said it will “vigorously defend” itself and that the lawsuit “threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.” It also said that DoJ winning the lawsuit would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering the government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.”

Mar 06, 2024NewsroomVulnerability / Zero Day

Apple has released security updates to address several security flaws, including two vulnerabilities that it said have been actively exploited in the wild.

The shortcomings are listed below –

• CVE-2024-23225 – A memory corruption issue in Kernel that an attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability can exploit to bypass kernel memory protections

• CVE-2024-23296 – A memory corruption issue in the RTKit real-time operating system (RTOS) that an attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability can exploit to bypass kernel memory protections

It’s currently not clear how the flaws are being weaponized in the wild. Apple said both the vulnerabilities were addressed with improved validation in iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, iOS 16.7.6, and iPadOS 16.7.6.

The updates are available for the following devices –

• iOS 16.7.6 and iPadOS 16.7.6 – iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPad 5th generation, iPad Pro 9.7-inch, and iPad Pro 12.9-inch 1st generation

• iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4 – iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2nd generation and later, iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 6th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later

With the latest development, Apple has addressed a total of three actively exploited zero-days in its software since the start of the year. In late January 2024, it plugged a type confusion flaw in WebKit (CVE-2024-23222) impacting iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and Safari web browser that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The development comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, urging federal agencies to apply necessary updates by March 26, 2024.

The vulnerabilities concern an information disclosure flaw affecting Android Pixel devices (CVE-2023-21237) and an operating system command injection flaw in Sunhillo SureLine that could result in code execution with root privileges (CVE-2021-36380).

Google, in an advisory published in June 2023, acknowledged it found indications that “CVE-2023-21237 may be under limited, targeted exploitation.” As for CVE-2021-36380, Fortinet revealed late last year that a Mirai botnet called IZ1H9 was leveraging the flaw to corral susceptible devices into a DDoS botnet.

Feb 22, 2024NewsroomQuantum Computing / Encryption

Apple has announced a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol called PQ3 that it said will be integrated into iMessage to secure the messaging platform against future attacks arising from the threat of a practical quantum computer.

“With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we call Level 3 security — providing protocol protections that surpass those in all other widely deployed messaging apps,” Apple said.

The iPhone maker described the protocol as “groundbreaking,” “state-of-the-art,” and as having the “strongest security properties” of any cryptographic protocol deployed at scale.

PQ3 is the latest security guardrail erected by Apple in iMessage after it switched from RSA to Elliptic Curve cryptography (ECC), and by protecting encryption keys on devices with the Secure Enclave in 2019.

While the current algorithms that underpin public-key cryptography (or asymmetric cryptography) are based on mathematical problems that are easy to do in one direction but hard in reverse, a potential future breakthrough in quantum computing means classical mathematical problems deemed computationally intensive can be trivially solved, effectively threatening end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communications.

The risk is compounded by the fact that threat actors could conduct what is known as a harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL) attack, wherein encrypted messages are stolen today in hopes of decoding them at a later point in time by means of a quantum computer once it becomes a reality.

In July 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) chose Kyber as the post-quantum cryptographic algorithm for general encryption. Over the last year, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, Google and Signal have announced support for quantum-resistant encryption in their products.

Apple is the latest to join the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) bandwagon with PQ3, which combines Kyber and ECC and aims to achieve Level 3 security. In contrast, Signal, which introduced its own PQXDH protocol, offers Level 2 security, which establishes a PQC key for encryption.

This refers to an approach where PQC is “used to secure both the initial key establishment and the ongoing message exchange, with the ability to rapidly and automatically restore the cryptographic security of a conversation even if a given key becomes compromised.”

The protocol, per Apple, is also designed to mitigate the impact of key compromises by limiting how many past and future messages can be decrypted with a single compromised key. Specifically, its key rotation scheme guarantees that the keys are rotated every 50 messages at most and at least once every seven days.

Support for PQ3 is expected to start rolling out with the general availability of iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, macOS 14.4, and watchOS 10.4 next month.

Cupertino’s iMessage security upgrade follows the tech giant’s surprise decision to bring Rich Communication Services (RCS) to its Messages app later this year, marking a much-needed shift from the non-secure SMS standard.

It also said it will work towards improving the security and encryption of RCS messages. It’s worth noting that while RCS does not implement E2EE by default, Google’s Messages app for Android uses the Signal Protocol to secure RCS conversations.

While the adoption of advanced protections is always a welcome step, it remains to be seen if this is expanded beyond iMessage to include RCS messages.

Feb 10, 2024NewsroommacOS Malware / Cyber Threat

Apple macOS users are the target of a new Rust-based backdoor that has been operating under the radar since November 2023.

The backdoor, codenamed RustDoor by Bitdefender, has been found to impersonate an update for Microsoft Visual Studio and target both Intel and Arm architectures.

The exact initial access pathway used to propagate the implant is currently not known, although it’s said to be distributed as FAT binaries that contain Mach-O files.

Multiple variants of the malware with minor modifications have been detected to date, likely indicating active development. The earliest sample of RustDoor dates back to November 2, 2023.

It comes with a wide range of commands that allow it to gather and upload files, and harvest information about the compromised endpoint.

Some versions also include configurations with details about what data to collect, the list of targeted extensions and directories, and the directories to exclude.

The captured information is then exfiltrated to a command-and-control (C2) server.

The Romanian cybersecurity firm said the malware is likely linked to prominent ransomware families like Black Basta and BlackCat owing to overlaps in C2 infrastructure.

“ALPHV/BlackCat is a ransomware family (also written in Rust), that first made its appearance in November 2021, and that has pioneered the public leaks business model,” security researcher Andrei Lapusneau said.

In December 2023, the U.S. government announced that it took down the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware.

Jan 23, 2024NewsroomVulnerability / Device Security

Apple on Monday released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and Safari web browser to address a zero-day flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The issue, tracked as CVE-2024-23222, is a type confusion bug that could be exploited by a threat actor to achieve arbitrary code execution when processing maliciously crafted web content. The tech giant said the problem was fixed with improved checks.

Type confusion vulnerabilities, in general, could be weaponized to perform out-of-bounds memory access, or lead to a crash and arbitrary code execution.

Apple, in a terse advisory, acknowledged that it’s “aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited,” but did not share any other specifics about the nature of attacks or the threat actors leveraging the shortcoming.

The updates are available for the following devices and operating systems –

• iOS 17.3 and iPadOS 17.3 – iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2nd generation and later, iPad Pro 10.5-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 6th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later
• iOS 16.7.5 and iPadOS 16.7.5 – iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPad 5th generation, iPad Pro 9.7-inch, and iPad Pro 12.9-inch 1st generation
• macOS Sonoma 14.3 – Macs running macOS Sonoma
• macOS Ventura 13.6.4 – Macs running macOS Ventura
• macOS Monterey 12.7.3 – Macs running macOS Monterey
• tvOS 17.3 – Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K (all models)
• Safari 17.3 – Macs running macOS Monterey and macOS Ventura

The development marks the first actively exploited zero-day vulnerability to be patched by Apple this year. Last year, the iPhone maker had addressed 20 zero-days that have been employed in real-world attacks.

In addition, Apple has also backported fixes for CVE-2023-42916 and CVE-2023-42917 – patches for which were released in December 2023 – to older devices –

• iOS 15.8.1 and iPadOS 15.8.1 – iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation)

The disclosure also follows a report that Chinese authorities revealed that they have used previously known vulnerabilities in Apple’s AirDrop functionality to help law enforcement to identify senders of inappropriate content, using a technique based on rainbow tables.

Jan 10, 2024NewsroomPatch Management / Threat Intelligence

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added six security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

This includes CVE-2023-27524 (CVSS score: 8.9), a high-severity vulnerability impacting the Apache Superset open-source data visualization software that could enable remote code execution. It was fixed in version 2.1.

Details of the issue first came to light in April 2023, with Horizon3.ai’s Naveen Sunkavally describing it as a “dangerous default configuration in Apache Superset that allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain remote code execution, harvest credentials, and compromise data.”

It’s currently not known how the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. Also added by CISA are five other flaws –

• CVE-2023-38203 (CVSS score: 9.8) – Adobe ColdFusion Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
• CVE-2023-29300 (CVSS score: 9.8) – Adobe ColdFusion Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
• CVE-2023-41990 (CVSS score: 7.8) – Apple Multiple Products Code Execution Vulnerability
• CVE-2016-20017 (CVSS score: 9.8) – D-Link DSL-2750B Devices Command Injection Vulnerability
• CVE-2023-23752 (CVSS score: 5.3) – Joomla! Improper Access Control Vulnerability

It’s worth noting that CVE-2023-41990, patched by Apple in iOS 15.7.8 and iOS 16.3, was used by unknown actors as part of Operation Triangulation spyware attacks to achieve remote code execution when processing a specially crafted iMessage PDF attachment.

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies have been recommended to apply fixes for the aforementioned bugs by January 29, 2024, to secure their networks against active threats.