Overview
This blog post aims to elucidate a critical vulnerability, CVE-2025-31204, that affects a wide swath of Apple products including watchOS, tvOS, iOS, iPadOS, macOS Sequoia, visionOS, and Safari. This vulnerability is particularly noteworthy due to its high severity score and the breadth of Apple devices it affects, making it a potential threat to millions of users worldwide. An understanding of this vulnerability is crucial for both cybersecurity professionals, who need to ensure they’ve deployed adequate defenses, and end-users, who need to understand the risks they face in their day-to-day interactions with their devices.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-31204
Severity: High (8.8 CVSS Score)
Attack Vector: Maliciously crafted web content
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: Required
Impact: Potential system compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
watchOS | 11.5
tvOS | 18.5
iOS | 18.5
iPadOS | 18.5
macOS Sequoia | 15.5
visionOS | 2.5
Safari | 18.5
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability hinges on a flaw in how the affected Apple operating systems handle memory when processing web content. An attacker can create maliciously crafted web content that, when processed by the victim’s device, leads to memory corruption. This memory corruption can potentially be exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary code, leading to system compromise or data leakage.
Conceptual Example Code
To illustrate this conceptually, consider an attacker who sends a HTTP request containing the malicious payload:
GET /malicious/webcontent HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
{ "malicious_payload": "..." }In this example, the ‘malicious_payload’ could be a specifically crafted sequence of commands that exploit the memory handling flaw in the operating system to cause memory corruption, and subsequently, a system compromise or data leak. This is a simplistic representation of the exploit and actual exploitation would likely involve more sophistication.