Do you remember the Zero-Click attacks that affected a number of iPhone users on a large scale in recent years? It seems that it will become more complicated and it will not be easy to create attacks of this type after the security updates that Apple made in iOS 14.5, and let's get to know the updates And the changes that Apple has made and what is their benefit.

Apple makes it more difficult to penetrate iPhones with Zero-Click attacks


What is a zero-click vulnerability?

A vulnerability exists in a product that has not been discovered or monitored before, and it can be described as one of the most powerful types of attacks on any type of device because it is unknown and through it it is possible to control and penetrate the phone device without the need for any interaction by the user in order to activate it.

This attack was used during previous years. In 2016, hackers working for the UAE obtained a zero-click exploit in the iMessage application and called it “Karma” and allowed them to penetrate many iPhones of specific people and in 2018, the spy company NSO Group ( The owner of the Pegasus program) offered a set of spy tools that provide zero-click attacks for sale and at the end of last year, these tools were used and many journalists hacked iPhones with a zero-click attack.


What did Apple do

The company has quietly made a new change in the way it secures the code running in its mobile operating system, the change in the iOS 14.5 beta which means it will be added to the final system.

Motherboard spoke with the developers of vulnerabilities and malware about the matter, and many of these specialists in discovering security vulnerabilities for the iPhone system believe that these changes made by Apple will make it very difficult for hackers to control the iPhone by zero-click technology. .

And one of the loophole developers who works for the government said, sandboxes will be more difficult for a zero-click attack, meaning sandboxes that isolate applications from each other in an attempt to stop the interaction of a single program and prevent its impact on the system as a whole.

The change revolves around something known as ISA indicators, which is a feature associated with the code of the iOS operating system that tells the program which code to use when running it, and until now, those indicators were not protected by PAC technology or index authentication codes that protect iPhone users from operations. Exploitation that works by publishing malicious code, as these codes prevent hackers from exploiting memory corruption errors, but the changes made by Apple added PAC technology to the ISA indicators.


Point of view

What Apple did in short is that it changed the way the operating system hides your code, but what really matters is that it has developed its own basic security models based on the premise of mutual distrust in security areas. The idea here is that each element in the security chain works independently, gathers a little bit of user information, and is built with a distrust model that helps enhance security flexibility and gives the iPhone user very strong protection, however this change makes zero-click attacks harder than ever. It means it will become impossible. It is now up to the hackers to find new technologies, in the end, no system is without vulnerabilities, but Apple wants to make these vulnerabilities as difficult as possible.

What do you think of what Apple is doing to protect iPhone users, tell us in the comments

Source:

vice

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