Network Security

Welcome to our security bulletin for December 2006;

UK council sites are already responding to vulnerabilities in Apple's OS-X reported today by Qualsys and SANs (associated with the US Department of Defence). Apple have patches available although some are not relying on Apple's automatic update system.

Apple Mac OS X including server versions 10.4.8 and prior are effected. They contain multiple vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

1. The AirPort wireless networking subsystem fails to properly handle malformed 802.11 frames.

2. Apple Type Services (ATS), used for font and text processing, contains a buffer overflow. A specially-crafted font file could exploit this overflow and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the ATS server process.

3. Finder fails to properly handle malformed ".DS_Store" files, used to store information about directory contents. An attacker could use this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user.

4. WebKit, used by Safari, fails to properly handle malformed HTML. A specially-crafted web page could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the current user.

5. The Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) subsystem fails to properly handle specially-crafted PPPoE frames. Mu Security have shown that if PPPoE is used, an attacker on the local network could exploit this vulnerability and execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. A denial-of-service vulnerability (not patched by this Security Update) in the Airport Extreme subsystem was discovered by the Month of the Kernel Bugs project.

Qualsys also quote Apple Security Advisory

Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat contains multiple ActiveX vulnerabilites that can be exploited a web page to take control of the computer viewing it. Adobe have confirmed the vulnerability and that they have no patches available at the time of writing.

However the impact of this can be disarmed by disabling the effected ActiveX control by using Microsoft's "kill bit mechanism". Details on the kill bit mechanism are here

Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 7.0.0 - 7.0.8 are effected as follows:

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