Severity: Medium
16 April, 2008
Summary:
- These vulnerabilities affect: Safari 3 for OS X (and Windows)
- How an attacker exploits them: By enticing one of your users to a malicious web page
- Impact: Numerous flaws, various results; in the worst case, an attacker could execute code on the victim’s computer
- What to do: Update to Safari 3.1.1 at your earliest convenience
Exposure:
Safari is the default web browser that ships with OS X. Recently, Apple also released Safari for Windows, pushingit to Quicktime and iTunes users via Apple Software Update.
Today, Apple released an advisorydescribing four vulnerabilities that affect Safari, and components that ship with it. The flaws affect both the OS X and Windows versions of Safari. The worst of these vulnerabilities potentially allows attackers to execute malicious code on your Safari user’s machines. If you use Safari in your network — whether on a PC or Mac — you should update to version 3.1.1 at your earliest convenience. Some of the fixed vulnerabilities include:
Severity: Medium
16 April, 2008
Summary:
- These vulnerabilities affect: Safari 3 for OS X (and Windows)
- How an attacker exploits them: By enticing one of your users to a malicious web page
- Impact: Numerous flaws, various results; in the worst case, an attacker could execute code on the victim’s computer
- What to do: Update to Safari 3.1.1 at your earliest convenience
Exposure:
Safari is the default web browser that ships with OS X. Recently, Apple also released Safari for Windows, pushingit to Quicktime and iTunes users via Apple Software Update.
Today, Apple released an advisorydescribing four vulnerabilities that affect Safari, and components that ship with it. The flaws affect both the OS X and Windows versions of Safari. The worst of these vulnerabilities potentially allows attackers to execute malicious code on your Safari user’s machines. If you use Safari in your network — whether on a PC or Mac — you should update to version 3.1.1 at your earliest convenience. Some of the fixed vulnerabilities include:
- WebKit buffer overflow vulnerability. WebKit is the web browser engine Safari uses on OS X machines. WebKit suffers from a buffer overflow vulnerability involving the way it handles JavaScript regular expressions. By luring one of your users to a malicious web page, an attacker could exploit this flaw to execute code on your user’s computer with your user’s privileges. Since OS X users don’t have administrative privileges by default, an attacker wouldn’t be able to exploit this flaw to gain complete control of their machines without significant user interaction; he could still, however, exploit this flaw to do anything the victimized user could do.
- WebKit cross-site scripting vulnerability. WebKit also suffers from a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability involving the way it handles URLs containing the colon character in a host name. By enticing one of your users into clicking a specially crafted link, an attacker could exploit this flaw to execute scripts on that user’s computer under the context of another legitimate site which your user trusts. For a more general explanation of XSS attacks, see our article “Anatomy of a Cross-Site Scripting Attack.”
Apple’s alert also covers two vulnerabilities that affect the Windows version of Safari. By enticing one of your users to a malicious web site, an attacker could exploit the worst of these two flaws to execute code on that user’s computer, potentially gaining control of it. However, we suspect few Windows users actually browse with Safari, so these flaws probably pose little risk to Windows users.
Solution Path:
Apple has release Safari 3.1.1 for OS X and Windows. If you use Safari in your network, you should downloadand install this update at your earliest convenience.
Note: You can also use Apple and OS X’s Software Update utility to install Safari updates automatically.
For All WatchGuard Users:
These attacks travel as normal-looking HTTP traffic, which you must allow if your network users need to access the World Wide Web. Therefore, the patches above are your best solution.
Status:
Apple released Safari 3.1.1 to correct these issues.