A vulnerability was found in Apple iOS 10.0/10.0.1/10.0.2 (Smartphone Operating System) and classified as problematic. Affected by this issue is an unknown code block of the component iTunes Backup. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a excessive authentication vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-307. The product does not implement sufficient measures to prevent multiple failed authentication attempts within a short time frame, making it more susceptible to brute force attacks. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

The weakness was disclosed 09/23/2016 by Oleg Afonin with Elcomsoft as iOS 10: Security Weakness Discovered, Backup Passwords Much Easier to Break as not defined blog post (Website). The advisory is available at blog.elcomsoft.com. The vendor was not involved in the coordination of the public release. Local access is required to approach this attack. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. Technical details are unknown but a public exploit is available. This vulnerability is assigned to T1110.001 by the MITRE ATT&CK project. The advisory points out:

When working on an iOS 10 update for Elcomsoft Phone Breaker, we discovered an alternative password verification mechanism added to iOS 10 backups. We looked into it, and found out that the new mechanism skips certain security checks, allowing us to try passwords approximately 2500 times faster compared to the old mechanism used in iOS 9 and older.

A public exploit has been developed in Binary. The exploit is available at elcomsoft.com. It is declared as highly functional. As 0-day the estimated underground price was around $25k-$100k. The advisory illustrates:

At this time, we have an early implementation featuring CPU-only recovery. The new security check is approximately 2,500 times weaker compared to the old one that was used in iOS 9 backups. (…) Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.10 is immediately available with 6 million passwords per second (CPU only) for iOS 10 backups. You are welcome to update right away. Further research is required to build an optimized GPU-assisted attack. We’ll let you know once we have it.

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

Productinfo

Type

• Smartphone Operating System

Vendor

• Apple

Name

• iOS

Version

• 10.0
• 10.0.1
• 10.0.2

License

• commercial

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CPE 2.2info

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