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Safari Security Hole Allows Cookie Theft

Posted by pudge on from the shut-it-down dept.

An anonymous reader writes "MacSlash posted a story about a vulnerability in Safari. The exploit allows someone to steal any of your domain-based cookies (passwords, private info, etc.) from any website. Mozilla and Internet Explorer had the same bug in the past."

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I wonder. by Ianoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Potentially, but I doubt it. The two browsers share a rendering engine, not much else. Cookies are purely a protocol issue, they add extra data when doing a GET/POST request on a web page. Nothing whatsoever to do with HTML rendering.

    Potentially a bug could exist in the Javascript engine, and since Javascript can access cookies, and they could be stolen this way. However this particular bug doesn't appear to be JS-related, rather it's something more fundamental (but easily fixed by Apple, hopefully).

    Since Konqueror uses KDE/QT's socket classes, whilst Safari uses the Carbon/Darwin sockets interface, it's unlikely the bug would rear it's head in Konqueror IMHO.

  2. Doesn't affect me? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am trying the "test" and all I get is:


    Please wait while loading the script

    You are stuck on this page ?
    It means that your browser is not vulnerable, sorry, or maybe, not so
    sorry, it's how the things should be !!!.
    You can press the back button now :)

    I am running Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1). Could it be because
    of This Hint?

  3. Re:Fix it, but... what's the fuss? by Taran · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the web app allows you to edit your information once you've aquired an authorized session, then stealing that authorized session could allow someone to hijack your information and/or your identity with that web app/company.

  4. Re:That's not the biggest Safari bug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    This isn't a Safari bug, this is how your OS deals with virtual memory.

    Look in /var/vm

    And you will see... swapfile1, swapfile2... etc. The OS creates these as needed.

    Now for the OS to recover swap space, there has no be no pages addressed to a swap file. When you run Safari what gets paged out to disk? Not safari, but all the other applications you are running. Therefore, quitting Safari does nothing. The OS won't page in the swap unless you need access to that page of memory.