Security News

Google announced today that they will begin rolling out the Privacy Sandbox system on a limited number of Android 13 devices starting in early 2023. The Privacy Sandbox is a set of technologies Google introduced in February this year, aiming to limit the tracking of users while still providing advertisers with viable performance-measurement options.

Many organizations use a Sandbox for their SaaS apps - to test changes without disrupting the production SaaS app or even to connect new apps. The same security concepts are used when creating a SaaS Sandbox - it duplicates the main instance of SaaS including its data.

Researchers are warning of a critical remote code execution flaw in 'vm2', a JavaScript sandbox library downloaded over 16 million times per month via the NPM package repository. The vm2 vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-36067 and received a severity rating of 10.0, the maximum score in the CVSS system, as it could allow attackers to escape the sandbox environment and run commands on a host system.

A now-patched security flaw in the vm2 JavaScript sandbox module could be abused by a remote adversary to break out of security barriers and perform arbitrary operations on the underlying machine. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," GitHub said in an advisory published on September 28, 2022.

Called SandBreak, this new vulnerability requires R&D leaders, AppSec engineers, and security professionals to ensure they immediately patch the vm2 sandbox if they use it in their applications. Vm2 is the most popular Javascript sandbox library, with around 17.5 million monthly downloads.

"An attacker could take advantage of this sandbox escape vulnerability to gain elevated privileges on the affected device or execute malicious commands like installing additional payloads," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said in a write-up. While Apple's App Sandbox is designed to tightly regulate a third-party app's access to system resources and user data, the vulnerability makes it possible to bypass these restrictions and compromise the machine.

Microsoft has published the exploit code for a vulnerability in macOS that could help an attacker bypass sandbox restrictions and run code on the system. The company released the technical details for the security issue, which is currently identified as CVE-2022-26706, and explained how the macOS App Sandbox rules could be avoided to allow malicious macro code in Word documents to execute commands on the machine.

Microsoft has published the exploit code for a vulnerability in macOS that could help an attacker bypass sandbox restrictions and run code on the system. The company released the technical details for the security issue, which is currently identified as CVE-2022-26706, and explained how the macOS App Sandbox rules could be avoided to allow malicious macro code in Word documents to execute commands on the machine.

Google in the next few days plans to begin testing fenced frames, a proposed web API to help its Privacy Sandbox ad technologies meet commitments to privacy of a sort. Fenced frames are designed to take the place of inline frames, or iframes, for specific scenarios like delivering interest-based ads without betraying interest data to the web page in which they're embedded.

Google has officially released the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android 13, offering an "Early look" at the SDK Runtime and Topics API to boost users' privacy online. "The Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview program will run over the course of 2022, with a beta release planned by the end of the year," the search giant said in an overview.