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One that hopefully doesn't portend other issues in Apple's closely-held AWDL code.Born Karnail (Cornell) Pitts on January 5, 1977, Detroit, Michigan, Bugz grew up without a father, his father having abandoned him and the rest of the family while Bugz was young.

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'What a magical bug,' says Patrick Wardle, principal security researcher at the Mac management firm Jamf.

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The work is yet another reminder of how valuable 'interaction-less' or 'zero click' attacks are for malicious hackers, and how important it is to have extra scrutiny on any device feature that is built to accept external inputs at any moment, like messaging services, the phone, Bluetooth pairing, or Wi-Fi. In general, researchers looking at Beer's findings were simply impressed by how powerful, and sinister, the attack is-all without the need for a hacker to trick their victim into clicking a link, downloading a malicious attachment, or doing anything else. 'But testing wireless protocols is really not that easy.' 'We've tested other wireless protocols, including Bluetooth on iOS, and found some vulnerabilities, so Ian's findings are definitely something we imagined would be possible,' says Jiska Classen, another TU Darmstadt researcher. As a user you can never know when AWDL is used.'Д®ven similar protocols that are public, like the Bluetooth standard, still have weaknesses because of their complexity. And the problem here is that the user does not really have an option to deactivate it to ensure his device security. 'Before that we need to reverse all the details to understand those protocols.

'It takes us weeks if not months until we can start looking at security issues,' Heinrich told WIRED. But he adds that there is a particular security tradeoff when it comes to protocols like AWDL that are accessible virtually all the time. Lab member Alexander Heinrich says he understands why companies like Apple want to keep their intellectual property from competitors. Apple's watchOS was also vulnerable and received a patch.ДЄs Beer points out, researchers from TU Darmstadt's Secure Mobile Networking Lab in Germany have done significant work reverse engineering and evaluating AWDL in the last couple of years. The attack is also 'wormable,' which means that a victim device could spread the infection to other vulnerable iPhones or iPads.

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From there, the attacker would have full access to the device's data, the ability to monitor its activity in real-time, and even potentially access extra-sensitive components like the microphone and camera, or the passwords and encryption keys in Apple's Keychain.

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AWDL is built on industry Wi-Fi standards, but allows multiple devices to exchange data directly rather than sending it back and forth over a typical Wi-Fi network with a router, modem, and internet service provider as intermediaries.Д«ut Beer discovered vulnerabilities in AWDL that would let a hacker send a specially crafted Wi-Fi packet that would cause an iPhone to crash and install malware on it.

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The vulnerability, which Apple patched back in May, involved a flaw in one of the kernel drivers for Apple Wireless Direct Link, the proprietary mesh networking protocol Apple uses to offer slick over-the-air features like AirDrop and Sidecar. 'Close access network attacks like this arenвЂ™t something you hear about every day.' 'ItвЂ™s very interesting research and super unique as well,' says Will Strafach, a longtime iOS researcher and creator of the Guardian Firewall app for iOS. The genius of the attack, though, is that the bug was exploitable through an iPhone's Wi-Fi features, meaning that an attacker just needed some antennas and adapters to launch the assault whenever they chose, compromising any nearby iOS device. But a report published this week by Ian Beer of Google's Project Zero bug-hunting team lays out a sinister yet elegant roadmap for how an attacker could have done just that before Apple released fixes in May.Д«eer's entire attack stems from a simple, well-known type of vulnerability-a memory corruption bug-in the iOS kernel, the privileged core of an operating system that can access and control pretty much everything.

One that can also then spread automatically from one iPhone to the next is practically unheard of. A hack that let an attacker take full remote control of iPhones without user interaction is bad enough.