CVE-2025-24252 is a critical vulnerability that affects various Apple products, such as macOS Sequoia, tvOS, macOS Ventura, iPadOS, macOS Sonoma, iOS, and visionOS. This vulnerability is caused by a use-after-free issue in the operating system's memory management, which could be exploited by an attacker on a local network to corrupt process memory. Apple has addressed this issue in macOS Sequoia 15.4, tvOS 18.4, macOS Ventura 13.7.5, iPadOS 17.7.6, macOS Sonoma 14.7.5, iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, as well as visionOS 2.4.

In this post, we will look at the details of the vulnerability, how the exploit works, and the changes made by Apple to patch this security issue.

Vulnerability Details

The vulnerability is caused by a use-after-free issue in the memory management of the affected Apple products. A use-after-free vulnerability refers to a situation in which an application continues to use memory resources after they have been freed. This can lead to corruption of process memory, and in some cases, it may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the affected process.

Exploit Overview

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need to be on the same local network as the vulnerable device. The attacker may do so by sending specially crafted network packets that would trigger the use-after-free vulnerability, causing memory corruption in the affected process.

Consider the following hypothetical code snippet found within the vulnerable software

void vulnerable_function(char *data) {
    char *memory_ptr = malloc(100);
    
    if (!memory_ptr) {
        return;
    }
    
    strncpy(memory_ptr, data, 100);
    free(memory_ptr);
    
    /* Use-after-free issue */
    memory_ptr[] = '\';
}

In the above code, the malloc() call allocates 100 bytes of memory and assigns the memory address to memory_ptr. The following strncpy() copies data into the allocated memory. However, once the free() function is called, the allocated memory is released, and any subsequent attempt to access it can lead to undefined behavior.

The use-after-free issue occurs when the code attempts to access the now-freed memory at memory_ptr[]. This access could lead to memory corruption, which can be exploited by an attacker.

Resolution and Patching

Apple has addressed this vulnerability by improving the memory management in affected operating systems. The following products have been updated to fix this issue:

You can find the updates for each product at their respective update pages

- macOS Sequoia 15.4
- tvOS 18.4
- macOS Ventura 13.7.5
- iPadOS 17.7.6
- macOS Sonoma 14.7.5
- iOS 18.4
- iPadOS 18.4
- visionOS 2.4

It is important to update your devices to the latest version as soon as possible to protect against potential exploits targeting this vulnerability.

If you are a developer, it is essential to avoid use-after-free vulnerabilities by ensuring that accessed memory has not been previously freed, and that you properly manage memory allocation and deallocation throughout your code.

Conclusion

In this post, we have explored the details of CVE-2025-24252, a use-after-free vulnerability that affects several Apple products. We have looked at the underlying issue, how it could be exploited, and how Apple has fixed this vulnerability by improving memory management in the affected operating systems. Users are encouraged to update their devices to the latest version to protect against potential attacks targeting this vulnerability.

Timeline

Published on: 04/29/2025 03:15:34 UTC
Last modified on: 04/29/2025 20:10:47 UTC