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Apple Patches Stagefright-Like Bug In IOS (fortune.com)
Reader Trailrunner7 writes: Apple has fixed a series of high-risk vulnerabilities in iOS, including three that could lead to remote code execution, with the release of iOS 9.3.3. One of those code-execution vulnerabilities lies in the way that iOS handles TIFF files in various applications (Alternate source: Fortune ). Researchers at Cisco's TALOS team, who discovered the flaw, said that the vulnerability has a lot of potential for exploitation. "This vulnerability is especially concerning as it can be triggered in any application that makes use of the Apple Image I/O API when rendering tiled TIFF images. This means that an attacker could deliver a payload that successfully exploits this vulnerability using a wide range of potential attack vectors including iMessages, malicious web pages, MMS messages, or other malicious file attachments opened by any application that makes use of the Apple Image I/O API for rendering these types of files," Cisco TALOS said in a blog post.
Perhaps I've just missed this in the reports, but is there any analysis on how this is impacted by sandboxing?
Apple tends to keep things pretty locked down and isolated, and while Stagefright was a Go Directly to Root kind of exploit, I'm curious whether this has the same risk. Can a bad TIFF file delivered via iMessage actually break out of iMessage? "Ultimately, an attack could give a hacker access to portions of a computerâ(TM)s memory" is not very descriptive here.
Side note: why the heck is anyone still supporting TIFF as a built-in image format. The TIFF standard is so complex that it has been the source of an innumerable number of security exploits over the years. It's a very risky format to support for exactly this reason.