Jack Dates found an exploit in Safari which won him US$100,000 along with 10 Master of Pwn points at Pwn2Own 2021.
Pwn2Own 2021
Pwn2Own is one of the biggest computer security competitions and it’s held twice a year at the CanSec West security conference. Hackers are challenged to find vulnerabilities in widely used software and mobile devices.
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Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative announce that Jack Dates from RET2 Systems won a prize for Safari:
Mr. Dates used an integer overflow through Safari to gain kernel-level access on a Mac. The kernel is the lowest level of an operating system that has complete control over everything, making this a serious hack in the hands of someone malicious.
An integer overflow means storing a bigger number than what that particular memory space supports. These can then lead to a buffer overflow, which is considered the number one most dangerous error in a system. When a program receives too much data, the leftover data can corrupt nearby memory space. This makes the program either report an error or act in ways the creator didn’t expect.
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