Google Project Zero researchers have revealed insights into a vulnerability in Apple Safari that has been extensively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, known as CVE-2022-22620, was first patched in 2013, but experts identified a technique to overcome it in 2016.
Apple has updated a zero-day vulnerability in the WebKit that affects iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Safari and could have been extensively exploited in the wild, according to CVE org.
In February, Apple patched the zero-day vulnerability; it's a use-after-free flaw that may be accessed by processing maliciously generated web content, spoofing credentials, and resulting in arbitrary code execution ."When the issue was first discovered in 2013, the version was patched entirely," Google Project Zero's Maddie Stone stated. "Three years later, amid substantial restructuring efforts, the variant was reintroduced. The vulnerability remained active for another five years before being addressed as an in-the-wild zero-day in January 2022."
While the flaws in the History of API bug from 2013 and 2022 are fundamentally the same, the routes to triggering the vulnerability are different. The zero-day issue was then reborn as a "zombie" by further code updates made years later.
An anonymous researcher discovered the flaw, and the corporation fixed it with better memory management. Maddie Stone examined the software's evolution over time, beginning with the code of Apple's fix and the security bulletin's description of the vulnerability, which stated that the flaw is a use-after-free flaw.
“As an offensive security research team, we can make assumptions about the main issues that current software development teams face: Legacy code, short reviewer turn-around expectations, under-appreciation and under-rewarding of refactoring and security efforts, and a lack of memory safety mitigations” the report stated.
"In October, 40 files were modified, with 900 additions and 1225 removals. The December commit modified 95 files, resulting in 1336 additions and 1325 removals," Stone highlighted.
Stone further underlined the need of spending appropriate time to audit code and patches to minimize instances of duplication of fixes and to understand the security implications of the modifications being made, citing that the incident is not unique to Safari.
