Origins of Mac OS X's runscript Security Hole

ahknight writes "codepoetry has an informative article about why there was a runscript command to begin with, where it came from, and how it's still used. A good read for people wondering why the command existed at all. Also, Daring Fireball has possibly the best solution so far with instructions on how to turn off the help and disk protocols entirely (much better than deleting random system components)." Update: 05/21 22:27 GMT by P :Daring Fireball also mentions an abuse of the telnet: handler that can overwrite any file you have write permissions to, and doesn't need a known path. There's also an applescript: handler, which I'd disable just for the heck of it, at this point ... Update: 05/21 22:36 GMT by P : Several readers note that Apple has just released Security Update 2004-05-24, which address the runscript problem, though apparently not the others.

Comments

HA

[huber]

proof macs are dying!! seriously though im not too worried about this problem. backups cure most ailments.

Opensource Linux vs. OS X security

[amichalo]

Does the understanding of the 'Help Script' security hole bring with it a correlation of opensource vs. closed source security issues?

If the Help Script vulnerability was within closed source code, does it imply that OS X, with it's use of Apple closed source on top of FreeBSD, is less secure than other 100% open source OSes? Has a definative security comparison between Linux and OS X been done? (How about one for XP vs. OS X vs. Linux for that matter?)