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iOS Bug Allows Full Access

posted by cmn32480 on Friday July 22 2016, @08:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoops! dept.

fleg writes:

The Guardian is reporting on an iOS bug ...

A flaw in the way Apple software handles images allows hackers to take over an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac or Apple TV with a simple iMessage or email.

The vulnerability in Apple's picture-handling Image I/O API means that a malicious Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) file can force a so-called buffer overflow, which allows a hacker to break through Apple's security and run their own code on a device.

Lots of apps use this API such as Messages, MMS, Safari, Mail.

Should the image be viewed automatically or manually, the attacker could then gain full control of the device, steal passwords and other information, all potentially without the user knowing.

Apple has released iOS 9.3.3, OS X 10.11.6, tvOS 9.2.2 and watchOS 2.2.2 to fix the bug.

Finally...

There are 1bn iOS devices around the globe, all of which will be affected by this security hole unless updated.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Friday July 22 2016, @09:08PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday July 22 2016, @09:08PM (#378779) Journal

    I wonder whether your meaning is that Apple appears to be using an old version of libtiff from more than ten years ago, or whether you mean that TIFFs and their abuse have been around for such a long time that there's no excuse for not handling them safely.

    According to a deep link, vulnerabilities exist not only in the handling of TIFFs, but also BMP images. However libtiff can handle BMPs.

    http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/07/apple-image-rce.html [talosintel.com]

    The other day there was a story titled "As Open Source Code Spreads, So Do Components with Security Flaws." [soylentnews.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @09:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @09:19PM (#378783)

    I want a new way to root because using TIFF to do it is such an old idea that it's boring as shit.

    Who the hell uses TIFF images legitimately anyway? Didn't Apple already fucking-kill Flash? Why can't Apple just fucking-kill TIFF too?

    • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday July 22 2016, @09:57PM

      by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Friday July 22 2016, @09:57PM (#378812)

      It is still used for faxing, I believe.

      It is a container format more than anything.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday July 29 2016, @05:52PM

        by sjames (2882) on Friday July 29 2016, @05:52PM (#381630) Journal

        In the '80s TIFF was notorious for being a non-standard. Every app had a different idea of which tags to include on output and which to insist on for input. Thus, 2 programs might output standard compliant TIFF files but be unable to read each other's output.

        This improved considerably as decent libraries came out that could derive missing tags from the ones provided (e.g. derive height from width and total size or aspect ratio).

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:41AM (#378955)

    Thanks for this, butthurt.

    Editors - please when we have vulnerability submissions, don't just link the cheesy pop news articles. We want the damn technical bulletin.