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heise Uncovers Leopard DoS Flaw

heise Uncovers Leopard DoS Flaw

by , 10:30 AM EST, December 10th, 2007

heise Security revealed on Monday that Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 operating system contains a security flaw that could allow an attacker to crash the system through a denial of service attack. The threat could allow an attacker to cause a kernel panic by taking advantage of an integer overflow when processing certain Mach-O binaries.

Macs with only one user account should be immune to potential attacks. For multi-user setups, however, the threat could be exploited even if the user doesn't have administrative level access because it does not require special privileges.

heise claims the flaw exists in Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5, and 10.5.1, and that Apple has not yet issued a fix. There are no know instances of this threat being used.

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Close Name:Guest
Mon Dec 10, 2007 1:46 pm Subject: Hmmm

According to the article:

"Single user systems should not be at risk as the bug can only be exploited by users logged onto a system."

You have to already be logged on to the system to cause a problem. If I have direct authorized access to a system, I can do all kinds of things to it. I suppose this ought to be fixed, but I don't see it being a very serious problem before it does get fixed.


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Close Name:Mikuro Posts: 457 Joined: 15 Jun 2002
Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:20 pm Subject:

Quote
Guest wrote:
If I have direct authorized access to a system, I can do all kinds of things to it..

Well, only if you're an administrator. Normal users should not be able to do much of anything to the system as a whole. If they can, it's only through bugs like this.


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Close Name:Guest
Wed Dec 12, 2007 11:54 am Subject:

Nobody should be running an OS with a single user. That means that one user would would have to be an administrator, and running under an administrator account for your daily tasks is just begging to be a victim.


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