A major vulnerability discovered by an American university and confirmed by Apple allows the theft of passwords directly from applications, the keychaing system of the Apple company being broken for the first time to carry out these thefts.
Indiana Institute of Technology researchers made the discovery and they claim that iOS or OS X are vulnerable, they can be exploited with the help of an application that must be opened in iDevices/Macs to exploit the keychaing system and steal passwords from applications native or third parties.
The existing vulnerability in the two operating systems seems to have been confirmed by Apple, Google and other companies with applications in the App Store, because Facebook, Evernote, native iOS applications and many other third parties can be exploited using this vulnerability.
The researchers managed to break the keychain, which stores the passwords for the applications, but also the communication system between the iOS or OS X applications, so that the data transfer between them can be intercepted to retrieve passwords or other confidential information.
We completely cracked the keychain service – used to store passwords and other credentials for different Apple apps – and sandbox containers on OS X, and also identified new weaknesses within the inter-app communication mechanisms on OS X and iOS which can be used to steal confidential data from Evernote, Facebook and other high-profile apps
Apple has been made aware of this problem since October, Apple asking for 6 months to secure iOS and OS X before this information is published, but so far it has done absolutely nothing to solve problems from the public versions of iOS and OS X.
The researchers even managed to publish in the App Store an application with malware that allows exploiting the vulnerability, so that Apple does not even check the applications for its existence, so anyone can be compromised by hackers without problems.
According to researchers, 90% of applications for iOS and OS X are exposed to malware, so we are talking about over 1 million applications that can be installed and from which passwords or many other data can be stolen.
The developers of 1Password, perhaps the most popular data security and password storage system, claim that there are no methods to protect users against this type of attack, with Google making the decision to completely remove the Keychain integration from Google Chrome.
According to additional explanations, it seems that the malware only deletes the data and password entries from the keychain, forcing users to enter them again, and only then is the data copied and transmitted to the hackers, so theoretically the existing data is not compromised.
The consequences of such attacks are devastating, leading to complete disclosure of the most sensitive user information (eg, passwords) to a malicious app even when it is sandboxed. Such findings […] are just a tip of the iceberg.
The worst part of such an attack is that it affects both normal applications and the applications of banks and other financial institutions, so any kind of data can be compromised by hackers in order to steal it.
Given that iOS 9 allows the installation of applications from outside the App Store, things get even more complicated.
