The price of some iOS exploits has dropped recently and at least one exploit acquisition company is no longer buying certain types of vulnerabilities. Experts believe this is a result of security researchers increasingly focusing on finding vulnerabilities in iOS.
Exploit acquisition company Zerodium announced last week that it would no longer be buying certain types of iOS exploits for the next 2-3 months due to surplus. It also announced that prices for iOS exploit chains that require some user interaction and don’t provide persistence will likely drop in the near future.
Furthermore, Zerodium’s CEO and founder, Chaouki Bekrar, said “iOS security is fucked,” noting that they are already seeing many exploits designed to bypass pointer authentication codes (PAC) — PAC provides protection against memory attacks — and a few zero-day exploits that can help an attacker achieve persistence on all iPhones and iPads.
Zerodium’s website says it offers up to $2 million for full iOS exploit chains that achieve persistence and require no user interaction. In comparison, the same type of exploit for Android can be worth up to $2.5 million.
The company also typically offers up to $500,000 for iOS persistence exploits, and remote code execution and local privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting iMessage or Safari. Hackers can earn up to $200,000 for Safari remote code execution exploits without a sandbox escape component and the same amount just for a sandbox escape.
However, Bekrar says in the past few months they’ve seen a spike in iOS submissions, particularly Safari remote code execution, sandbox escapes and privilege escalation. This forced his company to first reduce prices and then to completely suspe ..
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