20 exploitable flaws in Apple's Preview: researcher

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 March 2010 10:17

Business IT - Security

A prominent security researcher claims to have found 20 exploitable flaws in the Preview utility provided in Apple's Mac OS X to display PDF and other types of file. He's also found several in mainstream Adobe, Microsoft and open source applications.

Charlie Miller is a security researcher noted for his success in two successive Pwn2Own contests at CanSecWest security conferences, and for demonstrating ways of attacking mobile phones.

In an interview with Forbes, Miller claimed to have found 20 exploitable bugs in Preview, and three or four in each of Adobe Reader, Microsoft PowerPoint, and OpenOffice.

He used a technique called fuzzing - changing a random bit in a document to see if it causes the application to crash - to find nearly 1000 bugs in the programs.

If error checking is done properly as a document is read by an application, there should be no possibility of a crash occurring. Human nature being what it is, programmers rarely cater for every possibility.

Miller examined those 1000-odd crashes, and identified around 30 situations that could be used to take control of the program concerned.

So what are Miller's plans? See page 2.