Tough Time for Apple Softwares

The renowned master of great asthetics and simplicity, that is Apple Inc. is going through tough times supporting it's new OS Leopard and media player Quicktime. With a new Trojan horse in the territory of MAC OS X and a Highly critical Quictime vulnerability, Apple's claim of rock solid security is on the verge of question mark.

After the proven trojan horse that shaken the Apple camp, today security firm Secunia has reported that a 'highly critical' vulnerability in Quicktime that can bypass security, expose sensitive information and hackers can be able to access a system remotely. An error in the handling of image description atoms can be exploited to cause a memory corruption when a user is enticed to open a specially crafted movie file. Those movie files are spreading steadily through several pornographic sites. When a user opens a specially created video file, a boundary error in the handling of Sample Table Sample Descriptor (STSD) atoms can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow. Also there is multiple errors in Java for Quicktime as some untrusted Java applets can disclose sensitive information or can execute arbitrary code with escalated privileges when a user visits a web page containing a malicious Java applet.

There exists a boundary error in proccessing of panorama sample atoms in QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) movie files, which can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow when a user is enticed to open a specially crafted movie file. Same type of boundary error in the processing of PICT image files can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow when a user opens a specially crafted PICT image file containing an invalid length for the "UncompressedQuickTimeData" opcode.

Errors exist when parsing the Poly type opcodes (opcodes 0x0070-74) and the PackBitsRgn field (Opcode 0x0099) when processing PICT image files. These can be exploited to cause a heap corruption when a user opens a specially crafted PICT image file. Also an error in the parsing of CTAB atoms can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow when a user opens a specially crafted movie file containing an invalid color table.

If this vulnerabilities are successfully exploited, they allow to execute arbitary codes in a vulnerable computer.The only solution is the recent update to Quicktime 7.3 for Windows or MAC OS.