Every year, there are handful of meets around the world where experienced hackers can speak and share their knowledge with others to forward the essential skill that is security research.
One of such meets is BlackHat USA 2023, an event currently taking place at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada from August 5th to August 10th, 2023. And from what we can gather, renowned security researcher @pattern_F_ is expected to give a talk.
In a post shared to X (formerly Twitter), @pattern_F_ said that their talk would be a 30-minute briefing style presentation revolving around the platform security of Apple’s UserFS (Userspace Filesystem), which interfaces with the Files file manager app first introduced in iOS 11.
More specifically, it will delve into the security mechanisms, architecture, and function of Apple’s UserFS and how it mitigates risk associated with bugs by limiting their interaction to the Userspace as opposed to the kernel.
In addition to all of this, @pattern_F_ plans to discuss new “attack surfaces” utilizing UserFS to effectively break the security of iOS with vulnerabilities they discovered despite all the security motivations in place currently.
If you aren’t familiar with @pattern_F_, they are a member of the Ant Security group and were previously known for tinkering with iOS & iPadOS exploits.
While this talk has nothing to do with jailbreaking on its face, it remains to be seen what these attacks might be capable of and whether they could eventually be exploited for jailbreaking in the future.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to jailbreaking than coming up with vulnerabilities or exploits. If we learned anything from arm64e devices, it’s that we need PPL bypasses to go alongside powerful kernel exploits to make any sort of magic happen.
In any case, @pattern_F_’s talk is sure to turn some heads, as there’s a lot of interest in the iOS security space. One of the best ways we can learn how to hack our iPhones is to pay close attention to and learn from the folks who do it on a regular basis.
The date and time for @pattern_F_’s talk is Thursday, August 10th from 2:30-3:00 PM local time.
Are you excited to see what becomes of the demonstration? Let us know in the comments section down below.