Apple Warns of 3 New Vulnerabilities Affecting iPhone, iPad, and Mac Devices

Feb 22, 2023Ravie LakshmananEndpoint Security / Software Update

Apple has revised the security advisories^[1]
it released last month to include three new vulnerabilities
impacting iOS, iPadOS^[2], and macOS^[3].

The first flaw is a race condition^[4]
in the Crash Reporter component (CVE-2023-23520) that could enable
a malicious actor to read arbitrary files as root. The iPhone maker
said it addressed the issue with additional validation.

The two other vulnerabilities, credited to Trellix researcher
Austin Emmitt, reside in the Foundation framework^[5]
(CVE-2023-23530 and CVE-2023-23531) and could be weaponized to
achieve code execution.

“An app may be able to execute arbitrary code out of its sandbox
or with certain elevated privileges,” Apple said, adding it patched
the issues with “improved memory handling.”

The medium to high-severity vulnerabilities have been patched in
iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, and macOS Ventura 13.2 that were shipped on
January 23, 2023.

Trellix, in its own report on Tuesday, classified^[6]
the two flaws as a “new class of bugs that allow bypassing code
signing to execute arbitrary code in the context of several
platform applications, leading to escalation of privileges and
sandbox escape on both macOS and iOS.”

The bugs also bypass mitigations Apple put in place to address
zero-click exploits like FORCEDENTRY^[7]
that was leveraged by Israeli mercenary spyware vendor NSO Group to
deploy Pegasus on targets’ devices.

As a result, a threat actor could exploit these vulnerabilities
to break out of the sandbox and execute malicious code with
elevated permissions, potentially granting access to calendar,
address book, messages, location data, call history, camera,
microphone, and photos.

Even more troublingly, the security defects could be abused to
install arbitrary applications or even wipe the device. That said,
exploitation of the flaws requires an attacker to have already
obtained an initial foothold into it.

“The vulnerabilities above represent a significant breach of the
security model of macOS and iOS which relies on individual
applications having fine-grained access to the subset of resources
they need and querying higher privileged services to get anything
else,” Emmitt said.