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upofadown

It was a buffer overflow in a VOIP stack:

* https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/14/18622744/whatsapp-spyware...

Interestingly enough, Signal (and others) had the same sort of vulnerability on Android from a WebRTC stack:

* https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/08/exploiting-an...

The big issue in both cases is that the exploit was triggered before the user answered the call.

I think the moral here is that a secure messenger should not execute inherently insecure code (i.e.complex code) on behalf of entities that are not really well trusted by the user. The default should be always plain text.

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The other moral here is to stop using memory unsafe languages. It's just so incredibly dumb that we keep making excuses for this.

> The other moral here is to stop using memory unsafe languages. It's just so incredibly dumb that we keep making excuses for this

Has your "memory safe" language been audited for security ?

I think most influential companies such as Microsoft snd Google have said that c and c++ need to be deprecated. I think replacing old code with memory safe languages takes time, effort and money. Hopefully in a decade we can this can be fully done.

Does Rust make RCE impossible?, I don't think it does.

There is the option of not having data and code sharing the same stack, that seems like a better solution to me but that's such an option is not usually talked about.

It makes this kind easy pivot to RCE impossible. Attacks these days are generally more sophisticated than simple buffer overflows, fwiw. Targeting function pointers from a heap overwrite gives the same capabilities.

> Does Rust make RCE impossible?, I don't think it does.

Well, RCE (cargo) is built into it. /s

> I think the moral here is that a secure messenger should not execute inherently insecure code (i.e.complex code) on behalf of entities that are not really well trusted by the user. The default should be always plain text.

Whattsup and co, are very happy to execute untrusted code: images displayed in messages, websites fetched and rendered. Basically a bad actor's wet dream.

Was the spyware persistent? That is, would a reboot clear it? Not that it matters. Presumably, the attackers were so motivated they would re-infect the device the moment they saw it go dark.

No and you've provided a good reason why it doesn't have to.

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