A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild

TL;DR This exploit provides evidence that these exploit chains were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions; that is, the exploit techniques which were used suggest that this exploit was written around the time of iOS 10. This suggests that this group had a capability against a fully patched iPhone for at least two years.

This was an exploit for a known bug class which I had been auditing for since late 2016. The same anti-pattern which lead to this vulnerability, we’ll see again in Exploit Chain #3, which follows this post.

This chain targeted iOS 11-11.4.1, spanning almost 10 months. This is the first chain we observed which had a separate sandbox escape exploit.

This exploit chain supported iOS 12-12.1, although the two vulnerabilities were unpatched when we discovered the chain in the wild. It was these two vulnerabilities which we reported to Apple with a 7-day deadline, leading to the release of iOS 12.1.4. The sandbox escape vulnerability again involves XPC, though this time it's a particular daemon incorrectly managing the lifetime of an XPC object. It's the kernel bug used here which is, unfortunately, easy to find and exploit (if you don’t believe me, feel free to seek a second opinion!). An IOKit device driver with an external method which in the very first statement performs an unbounded memmove with a length argument directly controlled by the attacker:

This exploit chain is a three way collision between this attacker group, Brandon Azad from Project Zero, and @S0rryMybad from 360 security. On November 17th 2018, @S0rryMybad used this vulnerability to win $200,000 USD at the TianFu Cup PWN competition. Brandon Azad independently discovered and reported the same issue to Apple on December 6th, 2018. Apple patched this issue on January 22, 2019, with both @S0rryMyBad and Brandon credited in the release notes for iOS 12.1.4 (CVE-2019-6225). It even won a pwnie at Blackhat 2019 for best privilege escalation bug! So, why did the attackers, who already possessed then-functioning iOS Exploit Chain 4 (that contained the 0-days reported to Apple in February 2019), leave that chain and move to this brand new exploit chain? Probably because it was far more reliable, used only one vulnerability rather than the collection of vulnerabilities, and avoided the pitfalls inherent in the thread-based reallocation technique used for the sandbox escape in iOS Exploit Chain 4. The more important takeaway, however, is what the vulnerability was. In 2014, Apple added an unfinished implementation of a new feature named “vouchers” and part of this new code was a new syscall (technically, a task port MIG method) which, from what I can tell, never worked. To be clear, if there had been a test which called the syscall with the expected arguments, it would have caused a kernel panic. If any Apple developer had attempted to use this feature during those four years, their phone would have immediately crashed. In this detailed writeup, we'll look at exactly how the attackers exploited this issue to install their malicious implant and monitor user activity on the devices. My next writeup is on the implant itself, including command and control and a demonstration of its surveillance capabilities.

An analysis of CVE-2023-0266 as used in a modern in-the-wild Android exploit, dissecting the vulnerability, the exploitation strategy, and defensive lessons learned.