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The Story of a Simple and Dangerous OS X Kernel Bug

Posted by timothy on from the chink-in-the-armor dept.

RazvanM writes "At the beginning of this month the Mac OS X 10.5.8 closed a kernel vulnerability that lasted more than 4 years, covering all the 10.4 and (almost all) 10.5 Mac OS X releases. This article presents some twitter-size programs that trigger the bug. The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works. Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."

5 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't cause panic on 10.3.9 by noidentity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sadly I couldn't get my Mac OS X 10.3.9 (PowerPC) machine to panic with the C code.

  2. Still get the kernel panic on Tiger by ygslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Even after the recent security update on Tiger, I still get a kernel panic with the Python code supplied in TFA:


    import termios, fcntl
    fcntl.fcntl(0, termios.TIOCGWINSZ)

    Yeah, I'm planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard soon, after having skipped Leopard. But has Tiger already been abandoned to this extent?

  3. Re:Age is irrelevant, resistance is futile. by Jurily · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've met my share of code with the warning "There be dragons!".

    The word "fuck" in the comments is a much better metric. If it's more than one for the same function, it's time to pay attention.

  4. Re:Mature code? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, it has lasted for decades, although bugs have been found (which is rather the point, and how something achieves maturity; code doesn't become mature by sitting untested). Mac OS X is a linear descendent of NeXTSTEP. Development is now 25 years old, and some bits of the kernel date back to earlier BSD and CMU Mach projects. Last bits of the kernel I read had comments date-stamped 1997 and these were commenting on modifications to older code.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Re:Less vulnerabilities? Yeah, right! by Lars+T. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Could that have something to do with the fact that the vulnerability reports for OS X include tons of third party stuff (including Java or things that aren't used by default), that those for Windows don't?

    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck