Richard Zhu and Amat Cama, two white hat hackers, recently teamed up at the Mobile Pwn2Own contest in Tokyo and ended up earning a $60,000 prize after finding an iPhone exploit, according to a blog post on the Zero Day Initiative website.
The duo used a Safari weakness on an iPhone X running iOS 12.1 to retrieve a photo that had recently been deleted from the device. The hackers used a malicious Wi-Fi access point to exploit a just-in-time (JIT) compiler vulnerability.
The exploit the two hackers discovered can also be used to access additional files beyond deleted photos; the deleted photo just happened to be the first file the two came across and so it was used as a demonstration.Next up, Amat and Richard returned to the Short Distance category. This time, they were targeting the iPhone X over Wi-Fi. They used a pair of bugs – a JIT vulnerability in the web browser followed by an Out-Of-Bounds write for the sandbox escape and escalation. The successful demonstration earned them $60,000 USD more a
