8.8 High
CVSS3
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
REQUIRED
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
HIGH
Availability Impact
HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
6.8 Medium
CVSS2
Access Vector
NETWORK
Access Complexity
MEDIUM
Authentication
NONE
Confidentiality Impact
PARTIAL
Integrity Impact
PARTIAL
Availability Impact
PARTIAL
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
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 βmay have been actively exploited.β
βIn this case, the variant was completely patched when the vulnerability was initially reported in 2013,β Maddie Stone of Google Project Zero said. βHowever, 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.β
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 βzombie.β
Stating the incident is not unique to Safari, Stone further stressed taking adequate time to audit code and patches to avoid instances of having to duplicate the fixes and understand the security impacts of the changes being carried out.
βBoth the October 2016 and the December 2016 commits were very large. The commit in October changed 40 files with 900 additions and 1225 deletions. The commit in December changed 95 files with 1336 additions and 1325 deletions,β Stone noted.
βIt seems untenable for any developers or reviewers to understand the security implications of each change in those commits in detail, especially since theyβre related to lifetime semantics.β
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8.8 High
CVSS3
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
NONE
User Interaction
REQUIRED
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
HIGH
Integrity Impact
HIGH
Availability Impact
HIGH
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
6.8 Medium
CVSS2
Access Vector
NETWORK
Access Complexity
MEDIUM
Authentication
NONE
Confidentiality Impact
PARTIAL
Integrity Impact
PARTIAL
Availability Impact
PARTIAL
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P