5 ms·

From the cited paper: "These four types of integrity, do not establish memory safety, but merely attempt to contain the effects of its absence; therefore, atta

From the cited paper: "These four types of integrity, do not establish memory safety, but merely attempt to contain the effects of its absence; therefore, attackers will still be able to change software behavior by corrupting memory." and the paper then goes on to say, about Apple's implementation of the cited techniques: "This intuition is borne out by experience: in part as a result of Apple’s deployment of these defenses since 2019, the incidence of RCE attacks on Apple client software has decreased significantly—despite strong attack pressure—and the market value of such attacks risen sharply." "Decreased significantly" is not "eliminated"; indeed, you could paraphrase this as "the combination of these techniques has already been shown to be insufficient for security guarantees". Which is not to say that these mitigations are a bad idea; but I think their benefits are significantly over-sold in the paper.

commandersaki 1y ago
I said this in another comment, but an easy way to measure the efficacy is to look at the economy surrounding the zero day markets. Long story short, over the years it has become increasingly more expensive to both produce/supply and acquire exploits. This is attributable to the increasing mitigations and countermeasures, which include the ones in this document.
MattPalmer1086 1y ago
I don't think it is significantly oversold, although it is definitely overselling a bit: "More disconcertingly, in some cases, attacks may be still be possible despite the above protections." "We should prepare for a case where these defenses will fail to protect against a specific vulnerability in some specific software". My main concern with the paper is there is no careful analysis showing that the 4 techniques they propose are really sufficient to cover the majority of RCE exploits. Having said that, I don't dispute that having them would raise the bar for them a lot.

commandersaki 1y ago

I said this in another comment, but an easy way to measure the efficacy is to look at the economy surrounding the zero day markets. Long story short, over the years it has become increasingly more expensive to both produce/supply and acquire exploits. This is attributable to the increasing mitigations and countermeasures, which include the ones in this document.

MattPalmer1086 1y ago

I don't think it is significantly oversold, although it is definitely overselling a bit: "More disconcertingly, in some cases, attacks may be still be possible despite the above protections." "We should prepare for a case where these defenses will fail to protect against a specific vulnerability in some specific software". My main concern with the paper is there is no careful analysis showing that the 4 techniques they propose are really sufficient to cover the majority of RCE exploits. Having said that, I don't dispute that having them would raise the bar for them a lot.