Mac OS X vulnerability: proof of concept released

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 11 January 2010 02:44

Business IT - Security

A widespread security vulnerability disclosed eight months ago is apparently still lurking in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. A pair of security researchers have released a proof of concept exploit.

Maksymilian Arciemowicz and 'sp3x' of SecurityReason.com have publicly disclosed a proof of concept exploit for a vulnerability in Mac OS X's dtoa function that converts double-precision values to ASCII strings.

They say they reported the issue eight months ago.

The proof of concept merely triggers a memory access error, but such buffer overflow conditions can sometimes be exploited to run arbitrary code.

Although the issue has apparently been fixed in FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the researchers imply that the changes have not filtered through to Mac OS X, where it is said to be present in Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6).

The issue is also said to have been present in NetBSD, Google Chrome, Firefox and other Mozilla projects, Opera, MatLab, and other pieces of software.

The researchers say it may also exist in the Sony PlayStation 3.

Apple does not have a particularly good record when it comes to passing on fixes made to open source software incorporated in Mac OS X. One notable exception was the speedy release of an update for the BIND DNS server last August.