Upset with Apple’s handling of its Security Bounty program, a bug researcher has released proof-of-concept exploit code for 3 zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple’s newly released iOS 15 mobile OS The bug hunter, posting on Thursday to Russia-based IT blog Habr under the name IllusionOfChaos and to Twitter under an equivalent moniker, expressed frustration with Apple’s handling of vulnerability reports.
“I’ve reported four 0-day vulnerabilities this year between March 10 and should 4, as of now three of them are still present within the latest iOS version (15.0) and one was fixed in 14.7, but Apple decided to hide it up and not list it on the safety content page,” the researcher wrote When I confronted them, they apologized, assured me it happened thanks to a processing issue and promised to list it on the safety content page of subsequent update. there have been three releases since then and that they broke their promise whenever .”
The researcher added that the vulnerability dump conforms with responsible disclosure practices, noting that Apple was informed and has done nothing. And though the programming blunders aren’t terribly dire, from what we will tell, they need to be addressed at some point Apple on Thursday issued a patch for macOS Catalina to deal with a special zero-day, having skilled an identical exercise ten days earlier to deal with a zero-click iMessage bug wont to target human rights activists and other flaws.
The three unpatched iOS flaws include:
- gamed-o day which provides access to sensitive data such as Apple ID email address, full name, the associated Apple ID authentication token, read access to a shared contacts database, the speed dial database, and the Address Book.
- Nehelper Enumerate Installed Apps 0-day, which allows any user-installed app to determine whether any other app is installed.
- Nehelper Wi-Fi Info 0-day which allows an app with location access permission to use Wi-Fi without the required entitlement.
IllusionOfChaos said the gathering of this data shows the hypocrisy of Apple’s claims to worry about privacy. “All this data was being collected and available to an attacker albeit ‘Share analytics’ was turned off in settings,” the researcher said Kosta Eleftheriou, the developer behind the Apple Watch keyboard app FlickType (who earlier this year sued Apple for App Store market abuse), said via Twitter that he tested the Gamed 0-day on iOS 14.8 and iOS 15 and confirmed that it works as advertised.
“The bugs are neat, but unlikely to be widely exploited,” security researcher Patrick Wardle, founding father of free security project Objective See and director of research at security biz Synack, told The Register. “Any app that attempted to (ab)use them would wish to first be approved by Apple, via the iOS app Store.”
“To me, the larger takeaway is that Apple is shipping iOS with known bugs,” Wardle continued, noting that IllusionOfChaos claims to possess reported the bugs months ago. “And that security researchers are so frustrated by the Apple Bug Bounty program they’re literally abandoning thereon , turning down (potential) money, to post free bugs online. Wardle said he considered the researcher’s critique of Apple’s Security Bounty program to be fair.
“It’s not that Apple doesn’t have resources or money to repair this,” he said. “Clearly it’s just not a priority to them. “IMHO, the underlying reason is Apple’s hubris gets within the way. They (still) don’t see security researchers or white-hat hackers as being on an equivalent side. Apple’s internal security team gets it, but at the upper up, cultural level, they’ve all drunk the fruit juice , and believe their way is that the right way, and that they don’t need any external help.”
While some developers have found Apple’s Security Bounty program rewarding, others share the frustration expressed by IllusionOfChaos. In July, 2020, Jeff Johnson, who runs app biz Lapcat Software, went public with a privacy bypass vulnerability because Apple did not fix the bug he had reported. At the time, he told The Register, “Talking to Apple Product Security is like lecture a brick wall.”