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Ancient Flaws May Leave Mac OS X Vulnerable

Posted by Zonk on from the patch-to-the-left-patch-to-the-right dept.

mdeb writes "ZDNet Australia is running a story that claims Mac OS X 'contains unpatched security flaws of a type that were fixed on alternative operating systems more than a decade ago.' As an example, in August of last year, Apple patched the 'dsidentity' bug, which could easily have been exploited to grant a non-privileged user with admin rights the capability to create and remove 'root' user accounts."

5 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big f-in deal by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    now that you've gone and said that, i went and tested it... WITH A GUEST ACCOUNT. and suprise! doesn't work.

  2. Uhh... what? by FredFnord · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ...which could easily have been exploited to grant a non-privileged user with admin rights the capability to create and remove 'root' user accounts.

    Why... how awful. Or the user could have gone to the command line and typed 'sudo foo' and run anything as root that he wanted, including creating and deleting users or whatever else he wants to do, if he has admin rights.

    You could at least have chosen an example that wasn't totally useless on 99.9% of Macs. (Those which allow admins to sudo. Most people aren't dumb enough to explicitly grant admin privs to people they don't want to run as root, either because they know they know what it means and choose not to or because they don't and they don't just randomly check every check-box that comes along.)

    -fred

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    Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
  3. Has OS X Mach strayed too far from the tree? by ShyGuy91284 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The main thing that allows so many Linux distributions to work with low maintenance cost is that they are all based around the same kernel. When a fix is issued to the main kernel tree, it is fixed on all Linux's as they update. So distribution makers aren't pressed to patch it manually themselves. Perhaps OS X's variant of the Mach kernel has strayed too far from the main Unix tree, and suffered a form of seclusion from the goings on of the main tree?

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    In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
  4. Munir Kotadia's history... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    He's ZDnet's designated "Apple hitman." They love him because Apple stories - especially negative Apple stories - generate more page views and discussion than any others, especially on News.com.

    I'll grab some examples later, but it's no coincidence that this story is almost pure speculation.

  5. No, he's right, personal experience by theolein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I, together with another guy on the MacNN boards, discovered some of the more serious aspects of the vulnerability pertaining to url types and mounting of remote volumes around two years ago, when a website could quite easily download, mount and execute an applescript or any application on your machine without you seeing it (Apple's response to this was the fact that you have to authenticate any new application the first time it's run these days, something now also in WindowsXP and Vista). We notified Apple and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, after 3 or 4 months, Apple finally released the patch with the new functionality.

    It was an extremely serious vulnerability because it was so easy to exploit and Apple really dragged their feet on that, and on other similar cases.

    The guy is spot on with that comment. Apple is really slow in responding to possible exploits.