Incomplete information included in recent disclosures by Apple and Google reporting critical zero-day vulnerabilities under active exploitation in their products has created a “huge blindspot” that’s causing a large number of offerings from other developers to go unpatched, researchers said Thursday.
Two weeks ago, Apple reported that threat actors were actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in iOS so they could install espionage spyware known as Pegasus. The attacks used a zero-click method, meaning they required no interaction on the part of targets. Simply receiving a call or text on an iPhone was enough to become infected by the Pegasus, which is among the world’s most advanced pieces of known malware. “Huge blindspot”
Apple said the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-41064, stemmed from a buffer overflow bug in ImageIO, a proprietary framework that allows applications to read and write most image file formats, which include one known as WebP. Apple credited the discovery of the zero-day to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School that follows attacks by nation-states targeting dissidents and other at-risk groups.
Four days later, Google reported a critical vulnerability in its Chrome browser. The company said the vulnerability was what’s known as a heap buffer overflow that was present in WebP. Google went on to warn that an exploit for the vulnerability existed in the wild. Google said that the vulnerability, designated as CVE-2023-4863, was reported by the Apple Security Engineering and Architecture team and Citizen Lab.
Summary:
Apple disclosed and patched an actively exploited vulnerability in its proprietary image processing library.
At the same time, Google disclosed and patched an actively exploited vulnerability in its own webp processing in Chrome.
The timing and similarity highly suggests this is a problem with how almost all software has implemented the webp standard in its image processing software. Because processing webp files is such a fundamental function of any different pieces of software, there’s a concern that this is one vulnerability common to a huge set of commonly used software.
I wonder if this vulnerability is especially serious, given that the programs processing images often have escalated privileges.
At a certain point I’m left wondering the degree to which this is not a conspiracy, maybe additionally involving the other big guy three-letter agency(ies)