Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano: Chosen Ciphertext Attacks on Apple iMessage
summary
A new chosen ciphertext attack exploits Huffman-coded gzip inside iMessage by manipulating AES-CTR ciphertext, correcting CRC32, and using iCloud attachment fetches as a remote oracle; a proof‑of‑concept runs in under 2^18 queries, recovers 232 of 256 bits from a real ciphertext, and the authors emulate 10,000 runs to estimate success rates; practical mitigation blacklists repeated RSA ciphertexts and is deployed in iOS 9.3+ and OS X.
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:21What is iMessage
- 4:10How iMessage is Secure
- 5:00iMessage Encryption Format
- 6:34Identity Misbinding
- 8:38Stack Trace
- 9:27Encounter Mode
- 10:09Format Oracle Attack
- 10:22Apple Documentation
- 10:47Reverse Engineering
- 11:58Message Format
- 12:31Message Rejection
- 12:58Ciphertext Variability
- 13:39Gzip
- 14:26Observation
- 16:40Format Oracle
- 17:28Compression Oracle
- 18:00Gzip Oracle
- 18:13Read Receipts
- 18:58Push Notification
- 19:45Stealth Attack
- 20:08Proof of Concept
- 20:38The Hardest Part
- 21:42The Long Tail
- 22:57The Emulator
- 23:46Backwards Compatibility
- 24:15Tire Fire
- 25:26Questions
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