Heise Security reports Leopard crash risk
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 10, 2007 at 12:46pm
Heise Security says there’s a DoS vulnerability in Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) that can cause the system to crash. The flaw is an integer overflow in the load_threadstack function in mach_loader.c when processing Mach-O binaries, which can lead to a kernel panic.
The folks at Heise say that single user systems should not be at risk as the bug can only be exploited by users logged onto a system. The bug does, however, represent a problem on multi-user systems, as an attacker doesn’t require any special privileges to provoke this error they add. The vulnerability is present in Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1 and 10.4.11. No patch is presently available, but an exploit for testing is.
In addition, security web site, digit-labs.org,has reported a DoS vulnerability in the VPN service in Leopard (vpnd). Specially crafted packets can cause the demon to freeze. A demo for this vulnerability is also available. No patch is available. Users should restrict network access to the VPN service to known VPN clients.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
