Vulnerabilities removed from Safari for Windows

Stephen Withers
Friday, 15 June 2007 04:54

Your IT - Home IT

Just two days after its original release, Apple has updated the Safari for Windows beta to eliminate some of the vulnerabilities discovered by security researchers.

Safari 3.0.1 Public Beta for Windows fixes three flaws, including the command injection vulnerability reported by Thor Larholm.

"Quotes and whitespace is now filtered on any requests to external URL protocol handler applications, but other characters are still being passed without filtering so I expect to find some variations pretty soon," Larholm wrote in his blog.

Apple officials noted that this flaw "does not pose a security issue on Mac OS X systems, but could lead to an unexpected termination of the Safari browser." The Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac has not been updated at this time.

The other two are an out-of-bounds memory read issue that may allow arbitrary code execution, and a cross-site scripting issue. Neither of these affect Mac OS X versions, according to the company.

This implies that the six vulnerabilities found by Errata Security's David Maynor remain unfixed, as he claimed they "work on the currently shipping Safari browser on OSX".

Maynor reportedly told Wired that he plans to hold onto an exploit he developed until he can buy an iPhone and break into it.

The Safari for Windows beta may be downloading from Apple's web site, or via the Apple Software Update application installed alongside QuickTime or iTunes for Windows.

Apple also announced that more than one million copies of Safari for Windows were downloaded in the 48 hours following its release.