Apple has released a brand new security patch and this s one patch you should get into your device, asap. Interestingly, Google’s Project Zero has added another feather to its cap by unearthing and uncovering this hack, which would have allowed hackers to control your device remotely by exploiting the Wi-Fi chip in it.
Describing the potential of the bug, Apple said:
An attacker within range may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip.
I know, that doesn’t sound like much. But executing arbitrary code is almost tantamount to being able to do anything with your device. So that is not something you would particularly like happening with your device
.The Wi-Fi chip that is vulnerable to this particular hack was supplied by Broadcom and the devices making use of this chip include Nexus 5, 6 and 6P, most Samsung flagship devices, and all iPhones since the iPhone 4. The folks over at Project Zero were able to demonstrate the execution of a Wi-Fi remote code exploit on a fully updated Nexus 6P that was rocking a Android 7.1.1 version NUF26K.
By reverse engineering the call sites, Google research were able to discover certain bugs in the SoC.
Two of the vulnerabilities can be triggered when connecting to networks supporting wireless roaming features; 802.11r Fast BSS Transition (FT), or Cisco’s CCKM roaming. On the one side, these vulnerabilities should be relatively straightforward to exploit – they are simple stack overflows. Moreover, the operating system running on the firmware (HNDRTE) does not use stack cookies, so there’s no additional information leak or bypass required.
You can read about the bug and how it was first discovered, right here where Project Zero researcher Gal Beniamin expounds upon it in great detail.
