iTWire - Patch imminent for iCal bugs

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Patch imminent for iCal bugs

by Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 May 2008
! Watch out for iCal calendar files arriving in emails or being offered by web sites: they could be designed to exploit publicly disclosed flaws in Apple's calendaring application. Related stories Rumour: NVIDIA driven MacBooks out October 14th? Bogus 'Jobs heart attack' story hits Apple and citizen journalism stocks Smack, crack, hack and track any network with Linux (not Windows) Consumer Reports says not all breakfast cereals are good Australia finds teens aren’t eating fruits and veggies Core Security Technologies says there are three bugs in iCal that can be exploited by specially malformed ics files. Two of them cause the program to crash, but the third could be used to execute arbitrary code. According to Core's advisory, the flaws affect iCal 3.0.1, which is part of Mac OS X 10.5.1. No indication is given regarding the presence or absence of the vulnerability in the current version, 3.0.2. Core says it reported the bugs - along with a related and subsequently fixed vulnerability in Mac OS X Server's wiki server - at the end of January. It claims that Apple recently advised that the fixes would be released on May 19, and it therefore delayed publication of the advisory to May 21. There was no indication whether the fixes will be delivered as a stand-alone update for iCal, as part of a more wide ranging security update, or even rolled into Mac OS X 10.5.3 (which the rumour sites have been tipping as imminent for some weeks). As of this writing, the iCal patch has not been released, so watch out for its arrival via Software Update or the Apple security updates page. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Apple Mac OS X Security Software Stephen Withers Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now