Google’s Project Zero security researcher, Natalie Silvanovich discovered a serious vulnerability in Group FaceTime which allowed an attacker to call a target and force the call to connect without user interaction from the target, allowing the attacker to listen to the target’s surroundings without their knowledge or consent.
The bug was remarkable in both its impact and mechanism. The ability to force a target device to transmit audio to an attacker device without gaining code execution was an unusual and possibly unprecedented impact of a vulnerability.
The vulnerability was a logic bug in the FaceTime calling state machine that could be exercised using only the user interface of the device.
The logic bugs were found in the Signal, Google Duo, Facebook Messenger, JioChat, and Mocha messaging apps and at present all fixed.
WebRTC and State Machines
With WebRTC, we can add real-time communication capabilities to the application that works on top of an open standard. It supports…