A Look at iMessage in iOS 14

Posted By Samuel Groß, Project Zero

On December 20, Citizenlab published “The Great iPwn”, detailing how 
“Journalists [were] Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ 
Exploit”. Of particular interest is the following note: “We do not believe that 
[the exploit] works against iOS 14 and above, which includes new security 
protections''. Given that it is also now almost exactly one year ago since we 
published the Remote iPhone Exploitation blog post series, in which we 
described how an iMessage 0-click exploit can work in practice and gave a 
number of suggestions on how similar attacks could be prevented in the future, 
now seemed like a great time to dig into the security improvements in iOS 14 in 
more detail and explore how Apple has hardened their platform against 0-click 
attacks.

The content of this blog post is the result of a roughly one-week reverse 
engineering project, mostly performed on a M1 Mac Mini running macOS 11.1, with 
the results, where possible, verified to also apply to iOS 14.3, running on an 
iPhone XS. Due to the nature of this project and the limited timeframe, it is 
possible that I have missed some relevant changes or made mistakes interpreting 
some results. Where possible, I’ve tried to describe the steps necessary to 
verify the presented results, and would appreciate any corrections or additions.

The blog post will start with an overview of the major changes Apple 
implemented in iOS 14 which affect the security of iMessage. Afterwards, and 
mostly for the readers interested in the technical details, each of the major 
improvements is described in more detail while also providing a walkthrough of 
how it was reverse engineered. At least for the technical details, it is 
recommended to briefly review the blog post series from last year for a basic 
introduction to iMessage and the exploitation techniques used to attack it.

...

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-look-at-imessage-in-ios-14.html





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