Billions of Apple Devices at Risk from AirBorne

AirBorne is a family of 23 vulnerabilities in Apple AirPlay affecting billions of devices. The bugs enable remote control and data theft on iPhones, Macs, CarPlay and other Apple – and non-Apple – devices.

Steve Jobs, wherever he may be, is definitely unhappy. We did not have these levels of problems on his watch.

The bugs were found by security firm Oligo and not only affect Apple devices but also third party devices (like your car) that allow audio and video streaming.

The good news is that, at least today, hackers have to be on the same WiFi network (like at your neighborhood Starbucks).

Apple has released updates for Apple devices. It will likely take a month or more to roll them out to all devices (you can force the issue) and they have made patched software available to third parties.

You can assume that some third parties will update their software. Assuming that they are still supported. That, of course, does not mean that those devices will get patched.

If you have a third party device that uses AirPlay you will need to find out from the manufacturer **IF** and **WHEN** they will patch the device. For Chinese devices, assume they will not ever be patched. That is not part of their business model.

Some of the attacks require NO USER INTERACTION. Other attacks require A SINGLE CLICK. Neither of these is good news.

Some of the vulnerabilities are even WORMABLE, meaning they can spread from device to device on the same network.

Oligo even demonstrated an example attack.

One of the things they discovered is that MANY OF THE AIRPLAY COMMANDS ARE ACCESSIBLE WITHOUT STRONG SECURITY. What is this – 1990????

Apple, apparently, doesn’t do data validation in some cases. If you feed it data they assume that no one would ever try to launch an attack using corrupted data.

THE RESEARCHERS SUGGEST DISABLING AIRPLAY WHEN NOT IN USE.

Credit: Hackread

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