Attack Surface: CGO Memory Corruption
Description: Vulnerabilities arising from incorrect memory management across the CGO (C-Go) boundary between Swift and Go. This includes buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, double-frees, and other memory corruption issues.
How swift-on-ios Contributes: swift-on-ios fundamentally relies on CGO to enable communication between Swift and Go. This creates a direct pathway for memory corruption vulnerabilities if data is not handled correctly across the language boundary. This is the core attack surface introduced by the project.
Example: A Swift function passes a string to a Go function. The Go function incorrectly calculates the string's length and writes past the allocated buffer, overwriting adjacent memory.
Impact: Arbitrary code execution, application crashes, data corruption, denial of service.
Risk Severity: Critical
Mitigation Strategies:
* Fuzz Testing: Extensive fuzz testing of the CGO interface using tools like go-fuzz and AFL is crucial. This involves providing a wide range of random inputs to the interface to trigger potential memory errors.
* Memory Safety Tools: Use memory safety tools like AddressSanitizer (ASan) and MemorySanitizer (MSan) during development and testing to detect memory errors at runtime.
* Code Review: Rigorous code review of the CGO interface, focusing on memory allocation, deallocation, and pointer arithmetic. Multiple reviewers should be involved.
* Minimize Data Transfer: Reduce the amount and complexity of data passed across the CGO boundary. Favor simple data types (integers, booleans) over complex structures or strings when possible.
* Safe String Handling: If strings must be passed, use well-defined and safe string handling mechanisms (e.g., length-prefixed strings) and avoid direct pointer manipulation.
* Defensive Programming: Implement checks on both the Swift and Go sides to validate data sizes and prevent out-of-bounds access.
Attack Surface: CGO Type Confusion
Description: Vulnerabilities caused by mismatches in data types between Swift and Go, leading to incorrect interpretation of data and potential bypass of type safety checks.
How swift-on-ios Contributes: The CGO interface requires careful mapping of data types between Swift and Go. swift-on-ios facilitates this interaction, and errors in this mapping, inherent to the project's design, can lead to type confusion.
Example: A Swift Int is passed to a Go function that expects a uintptr. The Go function might misinterpret the Int value, leading to unexpected behavior or security vulnerabilities.
Impact: Potentially arbitrary code execution (depending on how the type confusion is exploited), data corruption, unexpected program behavior.
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
* Strict Type Definitions: Use explicit and well-defined type mappings between Swift and Go. Avoid ambiguous or implicit type conversions.
* Code Generation: Consider using code generation tools to automatically generate the CGO interface code, reducing the risk of manual errors in type mapping.
* Validation: Implement runtime checks on both sides of the CGO boundary to validate the types of data being passed.
* Testing: Thoroughly test the CGO interface with different data types and edge cases to ensure correct type handling.
Attack Surface: Malicious Go Dependency
Description: A compromised or malicious Go module introduced into the project's dependency tree. This is a supply-chain attack.
How swift-on-ios Contributes: swift-on-ios itself uses Go modules for dependency management. The project's reliance on the Go ecosystem introduces this risk.
Example: A seemingly benign Go module used for logging, and included as a dependency of swift-on-ios, is compromised and modified to include malicious code that exfiltrates data.
Impact: Arbitrary code execution, data exfiltration, compromise of the entire application.
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
* Dependency Auditing: Regularly audit all Go module dependencies of swift-on-ios using tools like go mod verify and go mod why.
* Vulnerability Scanning: Use dependency scanning tools (e.g., Snyk, Dependabot, or Go's built-in vulnerability scanning) to automatically identify known vulnerabilities in swift-on-ios's dependencies.
* Private Proxy: Consider using a private Go module proxy to control and audit the dependencies used by swift-on-ios.
* Vendor Dependencies: Vendor dependencies (copy them into the swift-on-ios project's repository) to have a known-good copy and to prevent unexpected changes from upstream.
* Minimal Dependencies: Minimize the number of dependencies in swift-on-ios to reduce the attack surface.
Attack Surface: Compromised Build Environment
Description: The build environment (e.g., a developer's machine or CI/CD server) is compromised, allowing an attacker to inject malicious code into the build process of the Go part of swift-on-ios.
How swift-on-ios Contributes: swift-on-ios relies on custom build scripts and the Go toolchain for its Go component. A compromised build environment could modify these scripts or the toolchain, directly affecting the compiled output of swift-on-ios.
Example: An attacker gains access to a developer's machine and modifies the build.sh script (or equivalent) used to build the Go component of swift-on-ios to include a backdoor.
Impact: Arbitrary code execution, backdoor in the application, compromise of the entire application.
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
* Secure Build Server: Use a secure and isolated build environment (e.g., a CI/CD pipeline with strong access controls) for building swift-on-ios.
* Code Signing: Digitally sign build scripts used for swift-on-ios and verify the signature before execution.
* Build Artifact Verification: Verify the integrity of build artifacts of swift-on-ios (e.g., using checksums) before deployment or integration.
* Developer Machine Security: Ensure that developers' machines used to build or contribute to swift-on-ios are secure and protected from malware.
* Two-Factor Authentication: Enforce two-factor authentication for access to build systems and code repositories related to swift-on-ios.