Researchers have revealed six new flaws in Apple’s AirDrop and Samsung’s Quick Share file sharing systems. The findings, published in an in-depth study by CISPA’s Helmholtz Center for Information Security, highlight significant risks to the security of mobile devices.
The research focused on mapping the potential attack layers of these two popular technologies. In these resources, devices first establish a signal for communication and then create a secure connection for transmitting data, which is decoded upon reaching the receiving device.
The vulnerabilities identified in AirDrop and Quick Share reside exactly between the formation of this connection bridge and the decoding process. An attacker could send incorrectly formatted data packets, causing the technology to fail and become vulnerable to exploits.
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AirDrop Vulnerability Discoveries
Under the leadership of Arash Ale Ebrahim and Nils Ole Tippenhauer, researchers found three vulnerabilities in AirDrop that allow attacks without the need for user interaction. They all originate from the same critical point: `sharingd`, an Apple service that manages much of the wireless connectivity in the company’s products.
`sharingd` is responsible for managing AirDrop and other wireless communication systems. If it suffers a failure, Apple’s entire connectivity ecosystem could be compromised. A sophisticated attack can disable integration between brand devices several times in a short space of time.
The most basic flaw works as a denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attacker is able to send tampered messages every two seconds, preventing `sharingd` from restarting itself and solving the problems.
The other two vulnerabilities directly affect Apple’s shared operating system frameworks, such as iOS. The method involves creating a spreadsheet file with around 200 nested layers, one inside the other, which is sent via AirDrop.
When trying to decode this complex spreadsheet, the system crashes due to the overload of reading these hidden layers, resulting in a memory collapse. This type of error is widespread and can affect any company application and system, including macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS and visionOS, putting the stability and security of a wide range of Apple devices at risk.
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Details about the flaws found in Quick Share
Regarding Quick Share, from Samsung and Google, researchers used a Galaxy S23 Ultra to examine the technology’s handshake protocol. This protocol is crucial for establishing an encrypted and secure channel for data transmission.
The first vulnerability observed occurs when an unauthorized device is able to control the connection processes before encryption is activated. The second breach allows control commands to travel through this channel without proper cryptographic security.
The most serious flaw was identified in the Quick Share Windows application. In it, two connections try to access and modify the same memory file simultaneously. This dispute causes the application to crash, which ends up deleting the file in question. To make matters worse, a Windows protection layer, Control Flow Guard, was disabled, making it possible for malicious code to be inserted into this memory.