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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

They only hijacked the radio chip, they didn't escalate to the main processor.

One way of attacking would be to intercept someone's internet traffic, and redirect them to a different site (ie, instead of going to Google, you go to get-hacked which looks just like Google).

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> Broadpwn is a fully remote attack against Broadcom’s BCM43xx family of WiFi chipsets, which allows for code execution on the main application processor in both Android and iOS.

This implies they have code execution on the application processor just from broadpwn (and not additional safari/ios exploits). Hijacking internet traffic is indeed serious but tech blog sites are already picking up on this and blowing it up. Example: https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/20/broadpwn-wifi-vulnerability-i...

> PSA: Update to iOS 10.3.3 to fix serious wifi vulnerability allowing attacker complete control

Probably because a device on the system itself has tremendous privileges; aside from interacting with non-hardened kernel code (drivers generally trust the device but to be malicious), they generally have DMA access, in PCI can impersonate the CPU when speaking to other devices, and can generally cause all kinds of havoc.

They intercept and modify packets to redirect to a web site they control. It exploits the main processor through the browser.

Assuming one has additional browser vulnerabilities, sandbox escapes and privilege escalation bugs. "Broadpwn" doesn't exploit main processor __anything__ by itself.

Does the broadcom processor normally have access to main memory? If so, I would have to consider that a complete attack absent any mitigation technology.

No. It's a pci express device (or SDIO/usb for older chips). All modern platforms have IOMMU's for those, and every decent OS will enable it.

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