“Security researchers from Pangu Lab, a well-known company that provides iOS jailbreaks, said on Monday that they have found a vulnerability that they believe affects around 10% of all iOS apps,” Catalin Cimpanu reports for BleepingComputer. “Researchers described the issue — which they named ZipperDown — as ‘a common programming error, which leads to severe consequences such as data overwritten and even code execution in the context of affected apps.'”
“Pangu Lab said it created an automated scan rule to search for ZipperDown in iOS apps. Researchers found that 15,978 out of the total of 168,951 iOS apps they scanned appeared to be impacted by the ZipperDown vulnerability, although, apps need to be manually inspected to confirm that they are affected,” Cimpanu reports. “The company is asking the developers of apps found on its list of potentially affected apps to contact the research team to receive details about the ZipperDown vulnerability, so each developer can test and fix his application.”
“Pangu Lab researchers also said that Android applications are also affected by similar issues and that they will release more details in the future,” Cimpanu reports. “The good news is that exploiting ZipperDown is not as straightforward as other vulnerabilities and an attacker must be in a network position to hijack or spoofing traffic to the device.”
The video below demonstrates that the user downloads and uses Weibo apps in an unsafe Wi-Fi environment, and attackers gain code execution in the context of user’s Weibo app by exploiting the ZipperDown issue in Weibo:
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: According to the Pangu Team’s ZipperDown.org website, “Note that the sandbox on both iOS and Android can effectively limit ZipperDown’s consequence.”
From the Q&A at https://zipperdown.org
4. What can ZipperDown do?
It depends on the affected app and its privileges. In general, attackers could overwrite the affected app’s data, or even gain code execution in the context of the affected app. Note that the sandbox on both iOS and Android can effectively limit ZipperDown’s consequence.
IOW: Unless you’re running an older iOS device with no sandboxing, this programming blunder is potentially irrelevant.
But there’s more to come…
Even within a sandbox, there are things an app can do that I would NOT want a malicious actor to be able to take control of.
The sandbox mitigates how far the danger can spread – it doesn’t eliminate bad things from happening.
And which older iOS devices don’t use a sandbox? Can our clarify? Please make sure your answer is relevant to your statement. Wrong again?
I don’t do other people’s homework. If you gave a rat’s about iOS devices you’d know what Apple has been doing to sandbox iOS AND to make sure third party apps. The effort has been going on since 2011, if that help your lazy brain to narrow down your search engine query, you bum.