Researchers find eight bugs in Safari for Windows

Computerworld - Just hours after Apple Inc. released a Windows version of Safari yesterday, security researchers had uncovered more than a half-dozen vulnerabilities in the browser beta, including at least three that could let attackers grab complete control of a PC.

Two of the researchers blamed Apple's "false claims" about security and what they called its "hostile attitude" toward bug finders for the rush to dig up flaws.

First off the mark was David Maynor of Errata Security, who posted notice of a bug about two hours after Apple made Safari 3 available for Windows. By the end of the day, Maynor had racked up six bugs. Four could be exploited to crash the browser and/or PC in a denial-of-service attack; the other two, Maynor claimed, were remote execution vulnerabilities.

Maynor, who clashed with Apple over a demonstration of a wireless hack on a MacBook at last summer's Black Hat security conference, didn't hesitate to take a shot at the company. "I can't speak for anybody else, but the bugs found in the beta copy of Safari on Windows work on the production copy on OS X as well," he said in a posting on the Errata site. "The exploit is robust, mostly thanks to the lack of any kind of advanced security features in [Mac] OS X."

Shortly after Maynor posted his first bugs, Aviv Raff, an Israeli security researcher noted for his contributions to last July's "Month of Browser Bugs" project, announced he had found a flaw, too. "I found it using a fuzzer tool, Hamachi, that was developed by HD Moore and I," Raff said in an instant message interview. "This is a memory corruption vulnerability, which is potentially exploitable for remote code execution."

Danish researcher Thor Larholm wrapped up Safari's opening day with the most damaging disclosure of all: a remote execution vulnerability accompanied by proof-of-concept exploit code. That code could be used to hijack the PC, said Larholm, who plucked the vulnerability from the browser and built the exploit in just two hours.

He laid part of the blame on Apple's inexperience in writing code for Windows. "On OS X, Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on Windows, namely intimate operating system knowledge," said Larholm. "The integration with the original operating system is tightly defined, but [that] knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems, and mistakes and mishaps occur.

"[For example] you can still find references to the OS X proprietary URL protocols "open-help-anchor:" and "network-diagnostics:" inside the resource files for the Windows release [of Safari]."