Apple Updates iOS And macOS Security Ahead Of Black Hat

Apple issued security updates for all of its supported operating system platforms on July 19, including IOS 10.3.3, macOS 10.12.6, watchOS 3.2.3 and tvOS 10.2.2. The new set of releases comes two months after Apple last patched its operating systems in May.

The IOS 10.3.3 update fixes 47 vulnerabilities on Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. Among the most noteworthy issued patched by Apple this month is a vulnerability that has been dubbed ‘Broadpwn’ which is set to be discussed in detail at the Black Hat USA conference on July 27.

“An attacker within range may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip,” Apple’s advisory states.

Apple security updates

The Broadpwn Wi-Fi issue is also identified as CVE-2017-9417 and was discovered by security researcher Nitay Artenstein of Exodus Intelligence. The Broadpwn CVE-2017-9417 vulnerability is also being patched in the new macOS 10.12.6 update as well. The same issue also impact’s Android devices and was patched by Google in its July security update.

“Meet Broadpwn, a vulnerability in Broadcom’s Wi-Fi chipsets which affects millions of Android and iOS devices, and can be triggered remotely, without user interaction,” the Black Hat session abstract states. “We’ll tell the story of how we found the bug and exploited it to achieve full code execution—and how we went on to leverage our control of the Wi-Fi chip in order to run code in the main application processor.”

The Broadpwn Wi-Fi vulnerability is not the only Apple security issue set to be discussed at the Black Hat USA conference next week. Security researcher Alex Radocea of Longterm Security Inc is set to detail security vulnerabilities in the iCloud keychain, that Apple patched earlier this year in its IOS 10.3 update in March 2017.

Other IOS patches of note this month include one for the CVE-2017-8428 vulnerability in Apple’s Telephony application. According to Apple’s advisory, the flaw could have potentially enabled an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Also of note, Security researcher Travis Kelley is credited by Apple for reporting the CVE-2017-7060 vulnerability in the Safari browser printing feature.

“An issue existed where a malicious or compromised website could show infinite print dialogs and make users believe their browser was locked,” Apple warned in its advisory. “The issue was addressed through throttling of print dialogs.”

Originally published on eWeek

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