Google Researchers Detail 5-Year-Old Apple Safari Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

A security flaw in Apple Safari that was exploited in the wild earlier this year was originally fixed in 2013 and reintroduced in December 2016, according to a new report from Google Project Zero.

The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-22620 (CVSS score: 8.8), concerns a case of a use-after-free vulnerability in the WebKit component that could be exploited by a piece of specially crafted web content to gain arbitrary code execution.

In early February 2022, Apple shipped patches for the bug across Safari, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, while acknowledging that it “may have been actively exploited.”

“In this case, the variant was completely patched when the vulnerability was initially reported in 2013,” Maddie Stone of Google Project Zero said. “However, the variant was reintroduced three years later during large refactoring efforts. The vulnerability then continued to exist for 5 years until it was fixed as an in-the-wild zero-day in January 2022.”

While both the 2013 and 2022 bugs in the History API are essentially the same, the paths to trigger the vulnerability are different. Then subsequent code changes undertaken years later revived the zero-day flaw from the dead like a “zombie.”

Read the full article here – https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/google-researchers-detail-5-year-old.html