Apple Yet To Push Patch For "Shellshock" Bug

An anonymous reader writes "Open source operating systems vulnerable to the Shellshock bug have already pushed two patches to fix the vulnerability, but Apple has yet to issue one for Mac OS X. Ars Technica speculates that licensing issues may be giving Apple pause: "[T]he current [bash] version is released under the GNU Public License version 3 (GPLv3). Apple has avoided bundling GPLv3-licensed software because of its stricter license terms....Apple executives may feel they have to have their own developers make modifications to the bash code."" It's also worth noting that there are still flaws with the patches issued so far. Meanwhile, Fedora Magazine has published an easy-to-follow description of how Shellshock actually works. The Free Software Foundation has also issued a statement about Shellshock.

Comments

Re:~/.cshrc

[oneiros27]

Oh, you think you're kidding ... but the problem isn't just bash ... it's that Apple uses bash in place of sh.

So most programs that shell out (php, perl, etc) are potentially vulnerable no matter what initial shell they were called from:

csh< env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' perl -e 'system "echo test;"'
vulnerable
test
csh>

Re:~/.cshrc

[fnj]

Rename /bin/bash to /bin/bash.bak then create a link [cyberciti.biz] from /bin/dash to /bin/bash ..

And get ready for a whole lot of scripts failing. Scripts that start with #!/bin/sh but are written dependant on bash features will fail. Scripts that start with #!/bin/bash on the other hand will just fail to start. You'll have a busted-ass system, but at least it won't be attacked.

Now if you were running debian or ubuntu /bin/sh would already be a link to /bin/dash, and there wouldn't be any screwed up scripts because the design of the file layout was made by people who weren't brain dead.