That's not accurate, the entitlements parsing logic on the App Store submission system has always caught this, it's the client side parsing that doesn't.
You can't submit an app to the store that uses this exploit, because the store will reject it as having invalid entitlements.
In that case it would only work with side loaded Apps signed with enterprise and developer certificates.
I stand corrected.
That being said I wonder... since we have two parsers on the device and one in submission process, if a more clever variant of this bug would have worked... I guess we will never know. For sure that parser is rock solid now.
I wouldn’t be too sure.
It has not happened though. Only app which has been in the App Store and utilized private entitlements, from what I’ve seen anyway, has been Uber.
- AppStore or not, you should not be able to access this file in an app. The exploit (plist parsing bug) is about breaking out of the sandbox and getting the permission to access system files (and much more!).
- Also. There is nothing stopping someone for using this technique to publish an app in the AppStore officially.
Or maybe I should have said “was”. Best case scenario Apple would retroactively check for naughty plist files in Apps submitted to the AppStore present and past, and ban developers that used the same hack. That being said, this is reactive and the damage would already be done.
This hack is not using a private API or doing something that Apple would have caught during App review. Even the system file path could be obfuscated (or downloaded from Internet later on).
So “don’t install apps outside the App Store” did not really help in this case.