Apple has launched safety updates to repair a zero-day vulnerability within the Safari net browser exploited throughout this 12 months’s Pwn2Own Vancouver hacking competitors.
The corporate addressed the safety flaw (tracked as CVE-2024-27834) on programs working macOS Monterey and macOS Ventura with improved checks.
Whereas Apple solely mentioned that the vulnerability was reported by Manfred Paul, working with Pattern Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, this is among the bugs the safety researcher chained with an integer underflow bug to realize distant code execution (RCE) and earn $60,000 throughout Pwn2Own.
“An attacker with arbitrary read and write capability may be able to bypass Pointer Authentication,” Apple explains in a Monday advisory.
Pointer authentication codes (PACs) are used on the arm64e structure to detect and guard towards surprising modifications to pointers in reminiscence, with the CPU triggering app crashes following reminiscence corruption occasions linked to authentication failures.
Whereas Safari 17.5 can be obtainable for iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS Sonoma 14.5, and visionOS 1.2, Apple has but to verify if it additionally patched the CVE-2024-27834 bug on these platforms.
When you run macOS Ventura or macOS Monterey, you’ll be able to replace Safari with out updating macOS by going to  > System Settings > Common > Software program Replace and clicking “More info…” below “Updates Available.”
Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024
Safety researchers collected $1,132,500 after exploiting and reporting 29 zero-days at this 12 months’s Vancouver hacking contest.
Manfred Paul emerged because the winner and earned $202,500 in money after demoing an RCE zero-day combo towards Apple’s Safari net browser and a double-tap RCE exploit concentrating on an Improper Validation of Specified Amount in Enter weak spot within the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge net browsers through the first day of the hacking competitors.
On the second day, Manfred Paul exploited an out-of-bounds (OOB) write zero-day bug to realize RCE and escaped Mozilla Firefox’s sandbox by way of an uncovered harmful operate weak spot.
Google and Mozilla fastened the zero-days exploited at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024 inside days after the competition ended, with Google releasing patches 5 days later and Mozilla after simply in the future.
Nonetheless, distributors not often hurry to repair safety flaws exploited at Pwn2Own since Pattern Micro’s Zero Day Initiative publicly discloses bug particulars after 90 days.
On Monday, Apple additionally backported safety patches launched in March to older iPhones and iPads, fixing an iOS zero-day tagged as exploited in assaults.
