0-days exploited by commercial surveillance vendor in Egypt
blog.google
blog.google
Also in this case the attack vector was MITM of http and one time links as it was a targeted campaign, but it feels there's nothing preventing someone putting this in an ad campaign or sms/discord/matrix/whatever spam and spraying it everywhere to build a botnet or steal user credentials or whatever.
sandbox in sandbox in sandbox in sandbox in sandbox in sandbox in sandbox
and stuff still manages to escape
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buff...
Living in memory or living off the land is generally a good idea, but you still want a chain of exploits anyways
1. Chrome code execution (gain foothold inside Chrome process).
2. Sandbox escape (gain code execution outside the Chrome sandbox, with the privileges of the Chrome process, which aren’t very useful except to stage another exploit).
3. Local privilege escalation, usually a kernel bug or similar, to elevate to root where you can break the process “sandbox” and establish persistence.
This is such a crucial point. Forced to read between the lines of the blog post (because the above information is missing), it sounds like there are currently unpatched issues in Android revolving around this?
Likely there’s a chrome sandbox escape and a kernel exploit remaining “unknown and unpatched”.
There is certainly many of those that we don't know about, if this was done in Egypt, imagine what a 3 letters agency have
Think of all the insidious corruption we find out about via declassification 50 years later. It's not like human nature has changed.
The going price was $1m for a full exploit chain on iPhone a while ago, and I’m sure it’s gone up, but I’m also sure it is minuscule compared to the amount of money governments have.
Everyone should assume this is fact, and not imagine some secret spy world. If you ever become interesting enough to hack, you will be, and there is little recourse (currently)
Every major black hat group operates with the blessing of some state. It’s about more than just money. Actual exploits are probably traded for “favours” (e.g. votes in international bodies, collaboration on thorny dossiers, extraditions, etc.). The infiltration of electronic communication is a major aspect in determining a state’s level of “soft power” and - in a software-run world - its weight only increases.
Citation needed. As far as I know that's true. Yes, some groups cooperate with the state (true in Russia after the escalation of the war in Ukraine, for example). But that's certainly not true for everyone - not every group has uses as an APT unit, most are just common criminals.
I have 0 doubt that literally everybody is being scraped by 1 or more governments and/or companies.
Because if they can, why not?
Android version was pretty similar but I think needed two more exploits to bypass Linux kernel mitigations.
PZ has a good technical writeup.
Which means there’s missing a sandbox escape and privilege elevation bug.
Also yes while delivery here was apparently ISP level MiTM using lawful intercept capabilities, there’s no reason the exploit couldn’t be delivered as a 1click via a phishing link.
I'm not sure the image view has been seperated out into any of the play store updated components. None of the ones name and description suggest they'll have OS UI widgets like that.
Firat of all, some part of Android is updated via the store. So the Chrome vulnerability and system libraries were probably updated without you noticing.
Also, this started in May. Before it went public both Apple and Google had already patched some vulnerabilities. Latest round was in August/September.
Are you saying that CAs should be refusing to issue certs for potentially spoofed domains?
I just mentioned LetsEncrypt because it's free and exceptionally easy to use. I'm not implying in any way they aren't providing a great service, it's just that that service also gets misused because it's cheap and easy.
My impression was the CA's made the likes of Standard and Poor look rigorous, but I'm happy to learn more from actual experience of them rejecting such an application.
My point wasn't to discredit LetsEncrypt, but to point out that Google's claim to mitigate the MITM attack vector with https-first wasn't a very strong argument. I mean, yes, sure: if you can't intercept or downgrade to HTTP the MITM doesn't work. But all the HTTP seems to do was redirect to a malicious payload. But you can also do a redirect in HTTPS.
So if you can spoof someone to go to https://g00gle.com/ it should be just as easy to launch the attack chain from there.
Source: Have to be that human from time to time
If you get the normal DV cert they don't provide any more verification than Letsencrypt.
And since browsers have moved away from indicating OV/EV certs to end users, not many organizations are paying for those anymore.
OTOH, Certificate Transparency Logs will give the game away, so there's that.
If you use the MITM judiciously, it's very likely that nobody will notice, or that those that notice can be compelled not to say anything.
Besides, if you have enough access to the CA, you can just get whatever cert is in the transparency log, though that's almost certainly harder for most nations and CAs.
That would require compromising the certificate requester.
But it requires a lot more steps.
Chrome, Safari, Firefox.
> And do all CAs support it?
Yes, the browsers made them.
> Besides, if you have enough access to the CA, you can just get whatever cert is in the transparency log
No, the CA doesn't have the private key of certs.
> No, the CA doesn't have the private key of certs.
Woops, yeah good point.
Sounds from other comments like my knowledge is out of date though, and browsers have real protections against the obvious ways that used to be possible, which is great news.
Of course then the question is how quickly browsers can roll out an update/config to distrust all future certs from said CA.
If you are James Bond and you want to have secure communications with M, you are better off using a custom appliance type mobile device meant only to do that one function and nothing else. You will have to rely on anonymous 3rd-party burner devices to leave messages encoded in pre-agreed sequence of rotating geo-locked codebooks on random message boards. Any less opsec and you are toast!
If you are a normal human-being using connected digital devices normally, then you should assume anything you put on those devices is already stolen. If you want to keep things truly private, keep it off digital (paper, old-school analog tape etc). Then, at least they will have to physically steal it from you – which, depending on the situation, might be much harder for them, but not necessarily much safer for you. So, you lose either way.
Only real way out is to have well-functioning democratic governments with strong transparency and checks and balances with strongly enforced privacy laws to protect its constituents from both domestic and foreign adversaries and strong support for initiatives like Citizen Labs.
https://x.com/jsrailton/status/1705271600868692416?s=46&t=Kq...
Spyware firms and 0-day vendors both have staff dedicating to finding 0-days. Why do Google and Apple not simply poach these staff?
I am sure Google and Apple can offer very competitive salaries, so why do they not do so? Is it because the cost of basically poaching all of the skilled 0-day hunters is deemed to be greater than the cost of just issuing patches?
But while they could try and poach them today, tomorrow there will be a whole load of new people working for those companies, and it'll just be a never-ending cycle.
For moral reasons do you mean? I would be surprised to learn there are a lot of people that are open to selling 0 day exploits to "bad actors" (granted that this term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here), but wouldn't want to work for Google or Apple.
> ...it'll just be a never-ending cycle
I think the idea is you pay them so well that they can work for a handful of years and remove any cash incentive reason for them to continue selling 0 days to bad actors.
- Everyone who doesn’t like US hegemony. Which happens about everywhere but US, in varied proportion, but even in Europe, and even worse in Middle-East,
- Everyone who doesn’t like monopolies. Capitalism of competition (as opposed to state capitalism, when the state borrows a trillion per semester, ahem) requires that monopolies be broken down to avoid distortion of competition. Helping bad actors can be, under their viewpoint, less bad than the damage done to a billion consumers consumers at a time. Plus monopolies impose a monoculture of occidentalism, with certain values that a firm in Egypt might consider worse than sponsoring bad actors.
I think you will also find that morals for many people are inversely proportional to the offered salary. An 0-day developer being compensated $130k may well abandon their particular morals if offered a $240k salary instead.
The number of people who successfully find 0-click 0-days for iOS/Android is very small. It's not a vastly replenishable resource.
The company (GreyShift) that broke the secure enclave had ex-apple security engineers working for them.
And if Apple is paying huge amounts of money and getting into bidding wars with all the other companies out there for vuln researches, that'll attract a load more people to start hunting.
Though, the reason governments found the best exploits for the longest time wasn't by hiring geniuses, but by giving people long periods of time and freedom to do kinds of research nobody else was motivated to do.
100k+ for a Safari on iOS code exec, another 200k for the Safari sandbox escape, then another 500k+ for the kernel exploit?
A full chain is real money. Especially when they resell this ability for 1-2M+ per user.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Zero
They also have excellent collaboration with independent researchers across the world. But given how much software is written everyday, they can still miss some issues.
Apple has way more than 10 full time researchers looking at iOS all day, trust me :). They also have a really generous bug bounty. There is always bugs though.
Yes
> They also have a really generous bug bounty.
Hell no
Used to be even worse.
If you refer come across anything, keep your mouth shut.
1. They do to some extent.
2. Which researchers are you going to hire? Lemon market, whoever wants to be hired is more likely a lemon.
3. Freelancing grayhat stuff is very rock n roll.
4. I bet some they try to hire and then the square and inflexible large corpo hiring process is just absolutely unfit for hiring such a person.
Not really. Most people in that space who have a “day job” are almost always open to being hired for better TC/benefits/more interesting problems.
Points 3 & 4 are largely correct.
It’s very rock and roll, but a very unstable income and most of the brokerages are comically untrustworthy. Also you may develop a conscience and find it hard to sleep at night.
Point 4… usually the people who can find such bugs reliably don’t work well in large corps past the short term. The unexplained gaps in a CV also aren’t conducive to getting past HR easily.
Poach them to discover 0-days in their software, as I said.
or alternatively: as lovely as the hacker -> employee fairytale sounds, a certain % of the "I would never work for Google/Apple" types would come in with the sole purpose of installing backdoors from the inside
So there’s also that.
They do. Plenty of white hat teams hire 8200 vets, but sometimes they'd rather make their own company instead of being a cog within an amaphorous foreign corporation.
Successful and skilled security people with a proven track record, don't have the paciente of putting up with the charade such large orgs require.
The reasons why it's not possible are myriad, but boil down to the fact that the world and humanity are very big things, and one entity can't possibly get them all, or even most of them. There's too much diverse heterogenuity built into everything. Including many worldviews and loyalties that go beyond money.
From the employee perspective: Wages are equal. Big Tech work is less interesting (build big bug finding machines that find have high quantity of bugs) and report the bugs that sit into some bug tracker only to maybe be fixed in 3 months. Offensive security work is more interesting. It requires intimate knowledge of the systems you research, since you only need a handful and the shallow ones get found by Big Tech. You must go deep. Additionally offensive security requires the know-how to go from vulnerability to code execution. Exploitation is not an easy task. I can't explain why engineers work for companies that I deem immoral, but that's probably because they don't feel the same way as I do.
From the employer perspective: How much does the rate of X vulnerabilities per year cost me? If our code has bugs but is still considered the securest code on the market, it may not benefit the company to increase the security budget. If the company expands the security budget then which division is getting cut because of it, and what is the net result to the company health?
If you want to fix the vulnerabilities you need to make the price of finding and exploiting them higher than the people buying them can afford. And you must keep the price higher as advances in offensive security work to lower the price of finding and exploiting them. Since defensive companies don't primarily make money from preventing bugs and offensive companies do primarily make money by finding bugs, there is a mismatch. The ultimate vulnerability in a company, or any entity, is finite resources.
Why would they give that to the employees to improve The Solution? It’s already solved as far as The Market is concerned. That would be Bloat
Rust, Zig, and others, are additionally paying compile time performance costs to remove some underlying vulnerabilities. Which is interesting and probably a good thing for software.
[1] https://gist.github.com/jfeilbach/f06bb8408626383a083f68276f...
Though poaching all is simply impossible, by raising prices you'll incentivize more people to become vulnerability researches, so more will always be available to the spyware firms
Apparently Firefox has "Https First" also but requires the pref dom.security.https_first to be set.
"HTTPS-Only Mode" is obviously best if you can do that.
In all likelihood they'd do that if the less direct/obvious method of transmission didn't work.
Presuming the other way around would be unreasonable.
Also I wonder if the lock down mode could block it.
These attacks when launched by government entities pretty much always rely on placing a box at the ISP that does the targeted interception/MiTM against a subset of subscribers.
So using a VPN would ensure your traffic is tunnelled “beyond” their reach.
Lockdown mode also would have prevented the iOS exploit chain, apparently.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/22/egypt-guns-money-me...
At a federal level law/power is continually traded for cash/favors. Heck, DoJ itself gets deployed in response to lobbyist demands (eg:copyright enforcement).
From what I see this case was egregious and involved a non-favored foreign state. Maybe that's the bar at which DoJ begins to care about political ethics.
Egypt is not 'non-favored'. The US has very close ties with Egypt's dictatorial regime[0], despite its awful domestic human rights record[1].
[0]https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/58552...
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/egypt-human-r...
The WTO sets the MFN list and Egypt isn't on it so strictly speaking you aren't correct.
Besides incurring WTO favor, the US also bestows it's own preferential treatments to those same nations. Egypt has long received many of those preferences so you're right in the ways that are most relevant.
That said, I wouldn't place Egypt on US's BFFs! Top partners in crime list - the one that includes 5/8 eyes nations and Israel.
I worked on the Hill and that's not how it works. Yes, lobbying happens, but the what Menendez is indicted for goes well beyond anything a lobbyist would do legally. On top of that, foreign lobbyists need to formally register with the DoJ, which obviously didn't happen, but that's just the icing on the cake.
> I worked on the Hill and that's not how it works.
Your are asserting that law/power is not continually traded for cash/favors. That's a pretty clear assertion and I appreciate it.
To follow, you would also assert that this chain doesn't exist in any meaningful way:
Major campaign donations are used by legislator -> Legislator benefiting from funds is critical to creation of law/regulation or to enactment of federal action taken that is favorable to donor -> Influential/lucrative, positions that benefit the legislator (or their interest) are made available to the legislator (during/after the elected term) by the donor.
recap: You are asserting that what I describe above is not occurring on an ongoing basis, correct?
If a legislator agrees with you, you want to keep them in the legislature, not retiring into industry.
Also, campaign donations are capped at like $5000 and most of what people think is corruption is them recklessly misreading the donation reports.
Similarly, it's Bernie and similar people who get the most donations these days because of ActBlue, and it doesn't help them win elections, because voters actually like the legislators you think are owned by corporations and actually vote for them.
I invested 15 seconds into a search query.
Former Members Dick Armey. Tom Daschle. Tom Foley. Trent Lott.
Once, these politicos ranked among Congress' most powerful members. Today, they share another distinction: They're lobbyists (or "senior advisors" performing very similar work). And they're hardly alone. Dozens of former members of Congress now receive handsome compensation from corporations and special interests as they attempt to influence the very federal government in which they used to serve.
ref: https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/top.php?display=Z
This is an incomplete list of just one body of lawmakers who went to work for just one industry. It's a very limited reference to the much, much larger whole.
>If a legislator agrees with you, you want to keep them
Although I included people tied to legislators (and their interests) you opted to limit your response to just legislators and even that seemed more platitude than substance.
> Also, campaign donations are capped at like $5000
So what? This falsely implies no donor can get more than $5k into any one campaign fund. Tossing it out there as primarily defining detail seems disingenuous. It omits non-cash contributions. It omits donations to traditional PACs, Super PACs, 527s, political parties, 501(c)4,5 & 6.
It omits all the possible avenues of getting money to candidates that someone with a CapHill political background almost certainly knows.
It does dovetail nicely with an alternate narrative about revolving doors not existing, however.
Those people are a combination of 1. really old and 2. lost an election. You can't keep people around forever, even if you might want to. (It also implies they're effective as lobbyists, which I don't think is necessarily true.)
> This falsely implies no donor can get more than $5k into any one campaign fund.
Those other things aren't the campaign fund, they're largely separate funds running separate campaigns and not controlled by the candidate. So they can't be used to directly pay the candidate.
Also, as I said, 1. money doesn't actually win elections and 2. if it did, it's Bernie and fellow non-corporate-Dem candidates who'd actually be winning, because small donor fundraising is more effective than this stuff is.
There are some straight up bribery scandals, but I think Bob Menendez is an exception that proves the rule and is going to lose his office based on his literal piles of gold bars bribery.
It is, however, actually the case with SCOTUS judges that they straight up take bribes and nobody can stop them.
The funny thing about exploits is, once hundreds of employees or soldiers have access to the exploit, they don't need to physically copy the code. They just need to understand how it works, to then open 10 other companies that use the same exploit, or sell it to 20 other companies on the dark web.
Although the IDF is great at stopping people from copying files outside of their networks, it can't stop people from remembering what they did during their service
Apple has never once, over multiple decades of failed attempts, demonstrated "resistance to penetration attackers with a moderate attack potential" for any of their products. To be fair, neither has Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Crowdstrike, etc. It should be no surprise that the companies, processes, and people who lack the ability, knowledge, and experience to make systems resistant to moderate attackers despite nearly unlimited resources are regularly defeated by moderate attacks like commercial surveillance companies. They certify that they absolutely, 100% can not.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/certifications/ios-security-...
[2] https://support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/CE...
[3] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 14
[4] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 16
[5] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 20
Generally only components are EAL certified. For example, the iPhone is not on there, but the security protecting access to Apple Pay on the iPhone 13 with A15 Bionic running iOS 15.4.1 (19E258) is EAL2+.
For many companies you just search: "{Product} Common Criteria" and they will usually have a page for it on their website somewhere.
You can also go directly to the certified products page: https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/products/
For smartphones you can see them there under "Mobility".
Unfortunately, it is fairly hard to parse if you are not familiar with the terminology. The general structure of Common Criteria certifications is Security Functional Requirements (SFR) which are basically the specification of what the product is supposed to do and the Security Assurance Requirements (SAR) which are basically how you certify the SFRs are met (and what level of assurance you can have that the SFRs are met). SARs can be bundled into Evaluation Assurance Levels (EAL) which define collections that reasonably map to levels of confidence. You can add SARs beyond the current EAL which is how you get a EAL level with a +, but it is important to keep in mind that just cherry picking certain SARs does not necessarily give you a holistic assurance improvement.
SARs and SFRs can be further pre-bundled into Protection Profiles (PP) which basically exist to provide pre-defined requirements and testing methodologies instead of doing it one-off every time. Some Protection Profiles support variable EAL/SAR levels, but these days people generally just certify against a Protection Profile with a fixed SAR bundle. This is what PP Compliant means. If you want to see what they certified against, you would need to look at the Protection Profile itself.
For smartphones, the standard Protection Profile for the phone itself is Mobile Device Fundamentals. If you look at the SAR bundle there you will see that they correspond to EAL1 + a small number of EAL2, resulting in a overall level of EAL1+. As they are in-between EAL1 and EAL2 I just classified it as EAL1 for my earlier post. If you peruse further you will see that basically every Protection Profile that companies certify to as PP Compliant are basically the same EAL1+ or thereabouts. So, if you see PP Compliant, it probably means EAL1+ or so.
Hope that helps.
Companies create a separate SKU for products that meet higher levels of security assurance for Common Criteria. I know for a fact that the companies you listed offer SKUs that meet higher EA levels (EAL4+) for Common Criteria. You just gotta pay more and purchase via the relevant Systems Integrators.
A consumer product line like the Apple iPhone isn't targeting DoD buyers. That's always been Blackberry Ltd's bread and butter
None of those companies has ever once certified a product to that level as far as I am aware. The failure is so complete that it is generally viewed as impossible to fix the structural defects in products that failed a EAL5 certification without a total rewrite. It used to say that in the standard somewhere, but the standard revisions have moved it so I can not quote it directly.
[1] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 20
Certain agencies and bureaus within the DoD do ask for this and pay for it, but most are good enough with EAL4.
Most attacks can be resolved by following the bare minimum recommendations of the MITRE ATTACK framework (marketing buzzwords aside).
Least Priviliged Access, Entitelement Management, Identity Enforcement, etc are all much easier wins and concepts that haven't been tackled yet.
Companies will provide EAL5+ if the opportunity is large enough, but it won't be publicized. Iykyk. If not, chat with your SI.
They were forced to relax them because Microsoft could not make bids that met the minimum requirements for DoD and high security projects and that made their Senators mad. They relaxed them to EAL4+ because that was the most that Microsoft could do.
They since relaxed them further to EAL2 because that is all the most large AV and cybersecurity appliance vendors could achieve. They justified it under the "swiss cheese" model where if you stack multiple EAL2 then you get EAL4 overall, which is insane. The government has since relaxed them even further since none of the companies want to do any certification since none of them can achieve a decisive edge over the others that they can write into the requirements thus disqualifying their competition, so certification is just a zero-sum game.
Outside some very limited cases, we don't have the tools to go there yet. EAL4+ is what people should aim for.
EAL6-7 certifications are basically the only known, existing certifications that have any evidence supporting that they are adequate to defend against the known and expected threats. As far as I am aware, there are no other certifications even able to distinguish products that can viably protect against organized crime and commercial spyware companies. Existing products max out every other certification and we know for a fact those products are ineffective against these threat actors. Therefore, we can conclude that those certifications are useless for identifying actual high security products adequate for the prevailing threat landscape.
Sure, if we had some other certification that could certify at that level and was more direct, that would be nice. But we do not, the only ones that we know to work and that products have been certified against are Common Criteria EAL6-7 (and maybe EAL5). We can either choose certifications that are cheap and do not work, or ones that work. Then, from the ones that work, we can maybe relax the requirements carefully to identify useful intermediate levels, or identify if some of the requirements are excessive and unnecessary for achieving the desired level of assurance.
However, the key takeaway from this is not whether we can certify products to EAL5 and higher or whether those certifications work or the cost-benefit of that certification process. The key takeaway is that EAL4 is certainly inadequate. Any product in commercial use targeting that level or lower is doomed to be useless against the threat actors who we know will attack it.
EAL4 is known to be too low against modern threats that will attack commercial users. We know this from experience where EAL4 systems are routinely defeated. Higher certification levels, such as the SKPP at EAL6/7, are known to be able to resist against much harder threats such as state actors like the NSA (defeating a NSA penetration test was a explicit requirement tested in the SKPP by the NSA themselves).
Low certification levels, like EAL4 and lower, that are the limit of the abilities of companies such as Apple and Microsoft are known to be useless against commercial threats. They are uncorrelated with protection against commercial threats because they are inadequate in much the same way that having a piece of paper in front of you is uncorrelated with surviving a gunshot. Systems that can only be certified to EAL4 and lower are certifiably useless.
I guess I don't know enough to say but I just doubt that, knowing what I know about other certifications. I expect that they're perhaps lightly correlated with security.
For example, a squat test is a reasonable measure of leg strength. Only squatting 20 kg means your leg strength is extremely weak. The test procedure is fine, getting results like that is not. If that is all you can do, that is quite problematic.
As to the certification itself, it is pretty good. Easily hacked products like iOS, Linux, and Windows are consistently unable to certify as moderately secure. That is vastly different than basically every other certification where products like Windows pass with flying colors even though we all know that is nonsense.
So, at the very least, low certification levels like EAL4 provide high confidence of lackluster security. You can withhold judgement of high assurance levels corresponding to high security if you like, but low assurance levels corresponding to low security is pretty clearly established.
Hold on a second. Assurance level is about, well, level of assurance the developers can provide. It is in most cases just paperwork.
CC has a different mechanism to define attacker capability & resources (cant recall what it's called) and set the security goals accordingly
You could individually incorporate a higher AVA_VAN into a lower EAL as a augmentation, but few do that. You also do not get any of the other conformance assurances that a higher EAL gives you. There is a reason we use EAL as a whole instead of just quoting the AVA_VAN at each other.
Though maybe you are talking about the Security Functional Requirements (SFR) which define the security properties of your system? That is somewhat orthogonal. You have properties and assurance you conform to the properties. Conformance more closely maps to “level of security” as seen in the AVA_VAN SAR. However, the properties are just as important for the usage of the final product because you might be proving you absolutely certainly do nothing useful.
So, OK I guess?
It's worth noting that CC evaluation does not score the actual practical security of a device or system, but the level of testing it was submitted to, which is consistent with pretty much every single governmental certification out there.
You are complaining that the 40 cm high jump test does not score actual jumping ability. You are right, it is a low bar that they should all be able to pass. You can not use the 40 cm high jump test to distinguish them. What you need to do is use the 100 cm high jump test. Some can pass it, but none of the large commercial vendors can. Sure, it would be nice if we had more gradations like the 60 cm and 80 cm tests, but we do not really know how to do that, so the best we can do is the 100 cm test.
It is also misleading to assert that a device or a system are less secure because they haven't been certified. Vendors submit requests to validate against specific levels or certifications, and it is not the goal of the certification authority to determine "how high" they score.
I am judging them by their maximum ability ever demonstrated under the most favorable circumstances and they still can certify resistance against moderate attackers. They have never developed systems that can protect against the prevailing threat landscape and they can not develop such systems. Their best is not good enough.
First of all, I don't think that's true, and if it is, I would like to see proof of Apple submitting their products for evaluation.
Second, you are judging an entire industry. This is not about Apple shortcomings, there isn't a single vendor doing what you say needs to be done.
Regardless, and this is more a personal opinion than a hard fact, most certifications out there are BS. PCI-DSS is basically a checklist of best practices, CC goes from common sense stuff to essentially impossible to achieve unless designed for the specific purpose, etc. Yes, all these helped create a very healthy - and profitable - industry where consultants have thrived on Powerpoints and PDFs, without really creating any tangible value.
We also have plenty of evidence that it does matter, they just can not do it. Here is Google touting their Common Criteria certification for the Titan M2 security chip hardware which is EAL4 + AVA_VAN.5 (resistance against penetration attackers with a high attack potential) [2]. Note that this is only the hardware (software was not certified; a critical severity vulnerability was actually disclosed in the software allowing complete takeover if I remember correctly) and only cherry picks AVA_VAN.5 so is still only EAL4, not a holistic EAL6 certification. Getting that certification was a deliberate effort and cost. If they literally did not care about the Common Criteria then they would just certify to the checkbox level like everybody else. It is because they could certify it to a higher level than most other can achieve that they chose to do it because then they could tout their unique advantage.
Basically everybody gets a certification and basically everybody displays their certification on their page. There is something to be said about them opting for a EAL1 over a EAL4. It is basically assumed that any serious vendor could probably get a EAL4 with some effort. So, there is no differential advantage to displaying a EAL4 since everybody could get it. It is just a zero-sum game to pay for certification if everybody knows nobody has a true advantage. However, if you can achieve EAL5 or higher, then you do have a unique advantage because basically nobody else can do it. The fact that none of the major vendors attempts EAL5, shows that they can not do it.
[1] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 18
[2] https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/google-pixel-7-and-p...
Basically, here is the product. Here are some design documents. We don't have anything more. Can we get our EAL1 please?
On PDF page 26 (document page 21) they describe the rigorous AVA_VAN.1 vulnerability analysis certification process they faced. The evaluation team basically typed in: "ios vulnerabilities" into Google and then typed in "ios iphone" into the NVD and verified that all of the search results were fixed. AVA_VAN.1 certification please.
To explain why, AVA_VAN.1 does not require a independent security analysis, it only requires a survey of the public domain for known vulnerabilities [2]. You need AVA_VAN.2 (which is only required in EAL2 and EAL3) before they actually attempt to look at for vulnerabilities themselves.
[1] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/epfiles/st_vid112...
[2] https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/files/ccfiles/CC2022PAR... Page 154
CC might be better than PCI-DSS, but not by much.
A fun exercise: find a list of commercial mainstream products with "high" EAL audits, and then look at their vulnerability histories.
But if you'd like an example from the EAL4 list: start with FortiOS.
The general crappiness of EAL4 goes all the way back to the Orange Book where EAL4 maps approximately to Level C2 (contemporaneous projects got certified to those levels simultaneously). That level was intentionally meant for toys before they put on their big person pants and release a grown up product with actual security [1]. It is a mystery why anybody thinks EAL4 and security belong in the same sentence.
[1] https://www.stevelipner.org/links/resources/The%20Birth%20an...
But upthread, you knocked Apple for not achieving an adequate assurance level. As you can see now, and from your own last comment, that doesn't make any sense. It's possible (though deeply silly) that there's some iPhone configuration that could "achieve" EAL4, but you yourself don't believe that has any meaning. I don't either.
I don't think EAL5 or EAL6 do, either, except that if you tell me your product is EAL5, I'll assume it's a small fixed-function device.
You keep calling it a farce, but you keep pointing at EAL4 and lower systems. Yes, those levels are farces, that was the whole point. Those are the levels for the certification of toys where documentation and paperwork is all that is needed, not proper design.
Complaining about the Common Criteria in the context of EAL4 and lower systems is like complaining about tissue paper manufacturers putting their tissue paper through bulletproof vest testing and certifying that it does not stop bullets. Yes, that is pretty stupid, farcical, and probably a waste of time. But no, the test is not stupid. It can test actual bulletproof vests, you just keep seeing stupid waste of time tests proving a useless fact that everybody already knows, the EAL4 quality system sucks and has no place in a serious security organization.
One is 'problems of standardization in high-development-velocity fields':
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577837
The other is "this is worse in security engineering broadly and outright catastrophic in cryptography engineering specifically"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25451351
There's probably better/longer, I just looked at the first page of "standards" search. The points are strong, like messageboard-argument-winning bear, though.
* The Common Criteria process is a farce, and things that are secure by dint of being EAL5+ are really secure because they're so small you can almost prove them with formal methods (which is not to say that everything EAL5+ has usefully applied formal methods).
* The meaning of the word "operating system" is different when we're talking about EAL5+ stuff; seL4 is an "operating system" that has been proven secure with formal methods, and it is secure, but it's secure in large part because it does almost nothing; it isn't comparable to Windows, macOS, or Linux. You couldn't build an iPhone experience on top of it (you could --- and people do --- host Unix kernels on top of L4 OS's, but when you do that you keep many/most of the security issues of that Unix kernel).
You've had a running critique of standards stuff here for years and it's good and the other person should read it. A bit of an unsuppressed "well, maybe if they looked at the principles, then they'll see the light" nerd-response on my part. You're not going to make an iPhone out of seL4, you're also not going to come up with a Secure Enclave or an IOMMU or an encrypted serial bus or whatever by reading standards/meeting certification reqs either because, generally, that's not how standards and certifications work. For multiple developed versions of this argument, see 'tptacek!
I'm sure you're right about the details of Jor-EAL5+ and the bottle city CRYSTALS-Kandor, just saying "also right in this other way but with less lore". Not that there is anything wrong with lore.
Well good news, that is not a mistake. EAL >=5 implies formal methods of various degrees. The standard demands the thing that works, amazing. It might be too hard for consumer companies to achieve, but that does not make the process a farce as long as there are companies that can certify useful functionality according to the process. And, although you seem to think the functionality that can be certified is limited, I doubt you consider secure cryptographic co-processors useless or unimportant.
I don't think you're making a coherent case for the security or insecurity of an iPhone with any of this stuff. Real security in complex products simply has nothing to do with the CCTL process. Which, I'm sorry to say again, is farcical.
If it's not clear: I've had the displeasure of working with this process in my career, most of which I've spent in vulnerability research.
Up to EAL4 all you need is a informal specification; what is basically useless paperwork.
It is only at EAL5 that you are required to supply a semi-formal design, ADV_TDS.4, and interface specification, ADV_FSP.5. At EAL6 you must also supply a formal model of the security policy, ADV_SPM.1, and a complete mapping between design and implementation, ADV_IMP.2. By EAL7 you are required to supply a complete formal design, ADV_TDS.6, and specification, ADV_FSP.6.
You then have a formal model of the security policy, the interface enforcing that policy, the design backing the interface, and a mapping from the formal design to the implementation. That is pretty dang exhaustive. I guess you could go further and demand a formal, machine-checkable correspondence between the implementation and the design?
Since you bring up that you have worked with the process, what products at EAL5 or higher have you had the displeasure of working on?
This is what we mean when we say an EAL5+ product is a different kind of thing. It's why this whole CCTL EAL thing is such a farce. The methods you're blaming big tech companies for not using are all things that preclude most of the products users want to use.
Can we stop pretending that any vendor in the industry has the option of serving customers with formally verified "EAL6" products? They don't. This isn't a thing, and hearing "EAL6" and "penetration testing" mentioned in the same sentence is grating. You don't penetration test a formally verified product. You do verification and assurance work for it, but nobody in the field would ever call it pentesting.
In addition, the lies suck all of the air out of the room for actual secure products because why go through the extremely hard work of actually making something secure when you can just lie about it. This has happened time and time again. There were multiple TCSEC Level A1 certified implementations when the DoD demanded real security. But, as soon as they lowered requirements to allow consumer systems that were inadequate for the threat environment, all of the effort and funding behind actual secure systems dried up. What we are left with now is a total wasteland of insecure products controlling systems too big for their britches and endless attacks getting closer and closer to total societal disruption. The only saving grace is that it is taking time for the attackers to scale to exploit this entire greenfield opportunity.
As to your other points, the SKPP explicitly included a penetration test done by a NSA team of the formally verified product under certification [1]: "AVA_VLA_EXP.4.3E The NSA evaluator shall perform independent penetration testing.". So, actually, "EAL6" and "penetration testing" do belong in the same sentence.
If Apple did want to ship a EAL5 product, the very first product decision would be starting over. HTML support or not does not even figure into the list; they have to tackle much more basic defects before getting to that. And I do not see how HTML and rich media support is even a challenge unless you made your security properties depend on exact rendering. You just use a separation kernel architecture to isolate the untrusted HTML renderer into a ephemeral sandbox that takes a HTML file and outputs an image. You might then say, "Apple already sandboxes the renderer.". Yeah, but their sandbox sucks and is regularly defeated. Almost as if having formally verified separation kernels as an underpinning might allow the obvious solution to work; assuming the same minds that built on sand do not add in more harebrained ideas. Hard to put it past them when they made so many other terrible security decisions.
Also, you did not answer what EAL5 or higher products you worked on that informed your disgust with the high assurance Common Criteria process.
[1] https://www.niap-ccevs.org/MMO/PP/pp_skpp_hr_v1.03.pdf Page 118
You can make this argument and remove all the Jor-EAL5 stuff after and it's the exact same argument, in fact, a better one because you don't have all that superfluous stuff. It's a parasitic red herring.
You lost me here. Where has Apple "insinuated" anything else but "secure enough for consumers"? Really, I want to know where they promote their products as the choice to protect oneself from nation-state adversaries, because so far, the only security offers they have for iPhone users are threat notifications [0] and lockdown mode [1], and they make no guarantees on either of them.
Samsung [2] and Google [3] make similar assertions.
I believe you are targeting a strawman here, especially given the fact that there are zero consumer grade phones out there that are CC certified to a level that you may consider adequate.
> In addition, the lies suck all of the air out of the room for actual secure products because why go through the extremely hard work of actually making something secure when you can just lie about it.
This is blatantly false.
There aren't consumer ready operating systems that may replace Apple's, and are EAL5+ certified.
Unless your point is that some day you may be able to install System Z in your laptop, that is.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102174
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212650