Impact: An attacker who is able to bypass Apple's certificate pinning,
intercept TLS connections, inject messages, and record encrypted attachment-
type messages may be able to read attachments
Description: A cryptographic issue was addressed by rejecting duplicate
messages on the client.
CVE-2016-1788 : Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Ian Miers,
and Michael Rushanan of Johns Hopkins University
I wonder if that's <https://www.cesg.gov.uk/>, which is "the Information Security Arm of GCHQ". If so I guess we should be thankful that they saw these vulnerabilities is a risk rather than an opportunity.
Apple's basically saying "Here are a bunch of bugs that are not fixed in the version of the phone the FBI has. You don't need us, or source code, or anything other than to hire someone to take advantage of these holes. Go away."
Nice timing.
Probably pissed off a bunch of the intelligence community today.
So many memory corruption issues, I'd like to think in 5/10 years time this would be solved and everything written in a safe language but maybe I'm being optimistic.
The people saying that 10 years ago were quite obviously being unrealistic. Holding such an opinion back then was essentially predicting that C++ would be replaced by Java, Python, etc.
Now, we've got languages like Rust that offer improved safety mechanisms without really sacrificing expressiveness or runtime performance the way "managed" languages do, so there's a real alternative for software that needs the highest performance or best battery life.
Seems doubtful. The overwhelming majority of the CVEs have external reporters cited.
Instead, I expect iOS 10 and the fall hardware announcements are where we'll start seeing signs of any really big changes, e.g. an Apple push to seal itself (and government actors) completely away from customer data access.
The issues reports are OS level rather than device level. Every device that can run iOS 9 gains these fixes. Full list is at https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/#compatibility , but basically iPhone 4S+ / iPad2+.