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Mac OS X Vulnerabilities from a Darwinian Birth PDF Print E-mail
Written by Editor   
Wednesday, 19 January 2005 19:45
Security researchers at Immunity Inc. released on Tuesday a series of Mac OS X 10.3 security vulnerabilities. The security issues where discovered after an audit of the open source Darwin kernel source code. Four vulnerabilities of varying severity where discovered within source for the recent Darwin kernel xnu-517.7.7, which where then checked against the Mac OS X 10.3 and found to exist there too. The issues where originally found by researchers during June 2004, however it seems that Apple had not been informed of their existence until the release of the advisory by Immunity Inc.

The first vulnerability is a integer overflow that affects the ‘searchfs()’ system call which is Mac OS X specific system call for searching catalogs of HFS file systems. The second issue is a kernel stack overflow within the ‘semop()’ system call. The third issue are is a collection of kernel overflows which have been inherited from old BSD kernels versions. Finally the fourth issue is a logic error relating to the setuid binary /usr/bin/at, which allows non-root/non-admin users to read any file on the file system.

For the full details of the vulnerabilities you can get the Immunity security advisory here. Meanwhile for Mac OS X users don’t forget to get the patch from Apple when it is available from Apple’s update service.

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Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 September 2006 23:10 )