freakynit parent
Four bits provide too few possibilities. Since memory allocations happen millions of times per minute, the chance of collisions grows very quickly, even with periodic reseeding.
But you only get one try. 15/16 times you get a very visible failure.
It isn't great. Most users won't assume malice when an app crashes. And if they reopen it a few times your chance of succeeding goes up quickly. But this is also assuming that you need a single pointer tag to exploit something. If you need more you need to get even luckier.
So it definitely isn't perfect protection. But it isn't trivial to bypass.
This could be solved at the OS level. Just crashing and closing the app would lead the user to simply re-open it and try again. However, if iOS detects this type of crash it could sternly alert the user that the application they are using is likely compromised. It could also transmit analytics for these specific types of crashes to Apple, who would have very realtime insights into newly compromised apps. I don't think the idea here is "crash silently and let the user reopen the app as many times as they want" I think its "crash very very loudly"
> If you need more you need to get even luckier.
This is a good point. Im not an expert but im guessing one is rarely enough, which would exponentially decrease your chances of success by brute force, e.g. 2 tags would be 1/256 etc
The idea is that a tag failure crashes your process.