Inherent Mac vulnerability

Macs are exposed to a dangerous vulnerability inherent to the structure of the Mac OS, claims a presenter from this week's Black Hat DC security conference. Vincenzo Iozzo, a student from Italy's Politecnico di Milano, says he has pinpointed an attack based on the way Macs allocate memory. In dissecting the Mach-O file format, Iozzo notes that he has been able to learn where application processes will appear in a Mac's memory. A skilled hacker could use the knowledge to insert malicious code into the same space as an active process, like Safari, and force a Mac to run malware.

Though Apple has tried to defend against such an attack by randomizing the location of certain variables, Iozzo observes that the process is not truly random, and that some information in Mac OS X provides clues as to where variables will appear. A successful attack using this technique would be especially serious, it is said, because it would leave no trace once a computer is shut off.

Iozzo suggests that any remedy for the problem will require a major revision of Mac OS X, such as Snow Leopard, though it is not known if Apple is attempting a fix. The likelihood of the memory allocation attack is low according to security researchers such as Dino Dai Zovi, who observes that it requires special effort and would target a platform normally ignored by hackers. Iozzo adds that an attack would be dependent on other vulnerabilities, which could potentially be defeated by normal security updates.

by MacNN Staff