Emergency security updates have been released by Apple for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Safari to patch two zero-day vulnerabilities, one of which has a publicly disclosed exploit. The other zero-day flaw addressed in these updates is also reported to be actively exploited in the wild. These emergency updates by Apple have been published less than two weeks after their previous updates, which addressed four critical severity flaws. 

The first vulnerability is found in iOS and iPadOS 15 and 16, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, and macOS Ventura. Tracked as CVE-2023-28206, this vulnerability is an out-of-bounds write flaw that affects the IOSurfaceAccelerator, used for high performance graphics processing. This is a high severity vulnerability with a CVSS base score of 8.6/10. An exploit of this vulnerability could result in the attacker being able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges on the target device. Although the exploit for this flaw is not known to be publicly disclosed, there are reports from Amnesty International’s Security Lab of this vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild. This flaw has been resolved through improved input validation in the new updates. 

The second vulnerability addressed in these updates is tracked as CVE-2023-28205, and is found in the WebKit browser engine, which is used by Safari, Mail, and the App Store, among other applications. This vulnerability affected versions of Safari, iOS and iPadOS 15 and 16, and macOS Ventura. This use after free vulnerability has been rated a high severity flaw, with a CVSS base score of 8.8, however updates for this flaw should be applied as soon as possible due to an exploit for this vulnerability being publicly disclosed, and the flaw being actively exploited. An attacker can send malicious web content to be processed by the vulnerable WebKit app, which can lead to arbitrary code execution. This vulnerability has been addressed in the new updates through improved memory management.  

Patches for these two vulnerabilities are available in Safari 16.4.1 for macOS Big Sur and macOS Monterey, iOS 15.7.5 and iPadOS 15.7.5, macOS Monterey 12.6.5, macOS Big Sur 11.7.6, macOS Ventura 13.3.1, and iOS 16.4.1 and iPadOS 16.4.1.