Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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There's a fundamental category error at play here: exploit chains like this one and the one behind FORCEDENTRY[1] cost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars to discover and weaponize, even before operationalization.

The people finding and building these chains are doing so as part of nation-state intelligence operations; they go well beyond what any reasonable civilian threat model contains.

Put another way: if someone in a competent nation state's IC decides that you're worth $10+ million dollars to compromise, they are going to get you. This is true whether you have an Android, an iPhone, or a Tamagotchi. The only thing that sets Apple apart here is that they've historically beaten Google to the punch on mitigations for these kinds of exploits. But from a threat modeling perspective, this attack is not comparable to the kind that most people have to deal with. Treating it as indicative of an overall security differentiator will not help you make ordinary security decisions, because anybody who gets this kind of attention will be Mossad'ed upon[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORCEDENTRY

[2]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Sure they do, and yet at the bottom of them we keep finding.. iMessage. Which is like a funnel that takes untrusted external input and feeds it into various ancient unmaintained native code blobs that were thrown into iOS for the "time to market". This time it's an 90s Apple extension to TrueType in a 90s Apple library that presumably no font on an iPhone actually uses, last time it was the 90s fax machine image compression algorithm in a never updated open source library. You see, the full exploit cost many many millions, but at the bottom there are entirely self-inflicted basic failures.

It would be so great if someone at Apple could get the buy-in to clean out this zoo but try explaining that to a product manager at these places.

Absolutely no disagreement there. iMessage's attack surface is ludicrously large for the actual behavior it delivers on the average user's phone.

> It would be so great if someone at Apple could get the buy-in to clean out this zoo but try explaining that to a product manager at these places.

It’s happening! Admittedly it’s happening slowly, but it is happening. PostScript support recently got stripped out of MacOS and iOS explicitly because the security risk was too great, and effort to make parsers and renders safe was greater than any residual benefit from the postscript format.

It also looks like the “fix” for one for the TrueType exploit was to simply strip out the ancient extension because it’s not used anymore. As for why it didn’t happen before now, that probably just because nobody knew it still existed.

It may cost a million, but it doesn't follow that every use(r) costs the same (could even also call this a category error).

Neither is "going to get you" a given, maybe another agency is in charge of the alternative methods of getting you, and they have different priorities that doesn't include your target (or alternative ways are much more expensive or too slow to be worth it)

The point is that it's incorrect to think of the US (or any other country's) IC as a force of nature, blasting out 0days to random civilians just for kicks. These things are expensive, very expensive, and are carefully orchestrated. They don't look anything like the average civilian's security breach, which is somewhere between "accidentally leaked their own password" and "TSA asks you to unlock your phone."

Neither is it correct to believe the myth of careful orchestration with only rational institutional goals and deep care about other people's money (though again, develop/use are different "these things")

Your “threat model analysis” takes for granted that a “civilian” is a billion times less important than a “nation-state”. It makes no sense to waste any time analyzing anything after such a conclusion. Therefore, something is wrong here.

I think you've misunderstood. The point was that there are (to simplify) two different threat models at play here: one where your most powerful adversary is somewhere between your family and domestic law enforcement, and another where you are worth $10+ million to a nation state.

99.99% of the world lives in threat model 1; our goal as security minded people is to protect these people. These people want general purpose networked computers in their pockets.

0.01% of the world lives in threat model 2; our goal is also to protect these people. But these people don't get protected while also having general purpose networked computers in their pockets.

Both groups are civilians, and both deserve security. But they also have different demands; if Apple forced Lockdown Mode's usability restrictions onto a billion people tomorrow, a large percentage of them would switch to materially less secure hardware and software vendors.

I'm trying to paint a bigger, better picture.

From the inside of the status quo, those threat models, well-informed reasoning, the descriptions of hierarchy, and what “should” and “should not” be possible, “millions will react like this, millions will react like that” are valid and respected. From the outside, there's a tiny bit of a problem: ordinary human has no value apart from that of a cog in the machine, there is really nothing to protect, an empty place, so all those powerful words crumble like a card house in situations like these.

What I'm hinting at is that that assumption is wrong, it's a dead end from the start. Just like tribes sitting around the bonfire, and discussing legendary totem animals and gods making their life reasonable and orderly, people today are charmed by the images of events “above”. It's just a belief in the workings of “modern world”. One needs a better base to live one's own life, not an axiom that one, for all intents and purposes, doesn't matter.

Challenging this axiom is why when I think of the threat model I face traveling from place to place, I come to the inevitable conclusion that I am very likely a target of assassination attempts.

Consequently, I ensure that my motorcade of armed guards are always with me, and accept cars loaded with only the toughest reinforced glass. I am, of course, paranoid about physical proximity to strangers and that mostly incentivizes me to avoid public travel, particularly flights (though even my private jets must be carefully maintained only by my most trusted insiders lest they find themselves tumbling out the sky near Tver). When flying on particularly important trips I send a decoy plane, and I make sure that air space near me is well controlled.

Or maybe, just maybe, I don’t actually face the same threat profile as presidents, spy agency bigwigs, and leaders of paramilitary organizations, and pretending I do is an act of high fantasy that far from empowering my true human soul would be so ridiculous as to make life unlivable!

Why is it that everyone balks at including these shadowy government agencies in threat models? It feels like people just don't want the heat. Would people just give up if it was some corrupt narcostate instead?

They've proven numerous times they couldn't care less about the rights of their own citizens. The US agencies in particular can't even muster any respect for their own allies. I don't even want to imagine what they feel justified in doing to foreigners. They're basically a threat to everyone on earth at this point and we all need the ability to defend against people like them.

So it costs millions to compromise someone? We need to find ways to make it cost billions then. Then we make it cost trillions. They should have to commit crimes against humanity in order to get anyone at all.

Nobody's balking at it. Apple and Google both dedicate significant engineering efforts towards making these kinds of exploit chains even more expensive and unreliable. See for example Lockdown Mode in iOS 16.

The point is this: good security means being able to intelligibly state your threat model and respond to its specific capabilities. Failing to do this results in all kinds of muddied thinking, making it harder to defend against more quotidian adversaries. If your threat model genuinely involves the US IC, then turning on Lockdown Mode is about the best you can do short of throwing your phone in the ocean. By all appearances, that would have prevented this chain.

There haven’t really been all that many hardware exploits for us to judge Apple on this, have there?

Not that I know of. There are other hardware-ish exploits (like checkm8), but I think most have been purely software.

(Hopefully what I said wasn't interpreted as a value judgement about hardware security specifically -- the only point I was trying to make is that ICs spend significant resources discovering exploits on all of these platforms.)

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