Hacker News Reader

>One of the major changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service which is now responsible for almost all parsing of untrusted data in iMessages (for example, NSKeyedArchiver payloads). Furthermore, this service is written in Swift, a (mostly) memory safe language which makes it significantly harder to introduce classic memory corruption vulnerabilities into the code base.

...This blog post discussed three improvements in iOS 14 affecting iMessage security: the BlastDoor service, resliding of the shared cache, and exponential throttling. Overall, these changes are probably very close to the best that could’ve been done given the need for backwards compatibility, and they should have a significant impact on the security of iMessage and the platform as a whole.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-look-at-ime...

View on HN

On incoming message, check one thing and one thing only: is the sender in the contact list? If YES... + Run the message through BlastDoor and continue as normal. If NOT… - Stop all non-essential parsing immediately. - Continue with a flow similar to modern e-mail clients (To increase your privacy, we have blocked some elements of this message). - Only continue normal message parsing if the user explicitly consents.