Amit Singh's Challenge: Find a Decade-Old Bug

dreicodan writes "Well this has too many juicy Mac OS X nuggets in one bag! All details are on this page, but I'll summarise. Apparently Amit Singh discovered a 10+ year old serious bug in OS X. The bug started in Nextstep and is still in Panther (and apparently Tiger, too). Then Amit wrote a program to demo the bug, but also made the program capable of hiding what it does using some complicated Mach kernel voodo! He then threw a challenge open to OS X experts to figure out the bug. It turns out that a week and some 1000 downloads later, three brilliant hackers (Alexy Proskuryakov, Andrew Wellington, Graham Dennis) were able to solve the puzzle. Also looks like other than these guys, nobody got anywhere with the problem. Be ready for extremely gory details of how the program was written and how it was decoded. Its a thrilling read, and OS X hacking doesn't get any more hardcore than this! Hopefully Apple fixes this bug now at last."

Comments

Reasons

[Tordek]

Well, you know, those bugs stay for that long for only one reason: Copypasting
So there, OS X hackers, Stop the lazyness...

To be honest

[A beautiful mind]

This adds up to the toy image _some_ claim the Macs have. Why would someone play around with a serious security bug there for 10 years? Well, a mitigating fact is that it was there for 10 years, but still it's bad to delay a fix because of a game.

On the other hand, Microsoft plays this game 24/7, with acknowledging vulnerabilities later.