Friday Security Fun

rgraham writes "Apple has release a new security update for the Safari cookie bug. 'Security Update 2003-12-05 updates Safari to prevent unauthorized access to a user's cookies.' They also updated the article on how to 'Configure Directory Access to Protect Your Mac From a Malicious DHCP Server.'" We posted that the other day, but this time, pictures!

Re:Or another fix

[SillyWilly]

It has been suggested that even disabling Cookies won't help: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/344992 As I understand it, this is because in Safari disabling cookies merely prevents creation of new cookies and not access to old ones. Therefore you should delete all cookies first.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[Rosyna]

A lot of apps use WebKit (Help, Sherlock, Safari, Mail) so it's easier to tell users to restart than to tell them to log out or to quit all those applications. A person that knows what they are doing will just force quit the installer.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[justMichael]

A person that knows what they are doing will just force quit the installer.

Or run the update from the CLI.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[tim1724]

Safari 1.1 (and 1.1.1) uses some new features of Panther which aren't in Jaguar. Hence it is not compatible with Jaguar, and wouldn't work.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[Hes Nikke]

The update needs you to reboot the computer. *sigh* Why is that? This is a web browser we're talking about.

oddly, this update isn't an update to Safari, instead, it's an update to the CoreFoundation framework!

as the name implies, CoreFoundation is the core of all your aqua apps, or at the very least, all your cocoa apps. one of the things this framework can do is let any app that uses the framework to get data from a URL, so it would make sense that the cookie handling would be there too. yeah, in this case i'd say a reboot is absolutely called for.

Some links

[blb]

The knowledgebase article for 10.2.8 [apple.com] and for 10.3.1 [apple.com].

Re:Or another fix

[Graff]

Just don't allow cookies.

If by "fix" you mean "break a lot of functionality on sites" then yes, that certainly is an option.

That's why I love OmniWeb. It allows you to accept cookies, but throw them out when you quit the browser. Sure I lose such nifty "features" as not having to log into some websites but I also cut ads and whatnot of the ability to track me across sites for long periods.

Honestly, there need to be much better built-in controls on all browsers for limiting a server's access to data on your computer.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[bat, blind as a]

$ sudo softwareupdate -i -a
Password:
Software Update Tool
Copyright 2002-2003 Apple Computer, Inc.

Security Update 2003-12-05: 0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...1 00
Optimizing system performance. This may take a while...
Done.

You have installed one or more updates that requires that you restart your
computer. Please restart immediately.

Re:Eerily reminiscent of my Windows days...

[Graff]

The compositing is done by the video card (remember, Quartz Extreme only accelerates compositing!), but much of the drawing is done by the CPU. The Dock's genie effect, in particular, is drawn by software.

Both of the Dock minimization effects are handled by the GPU. The window is drawn as normal by the application that owns it and is passed off to Quartz Extreme, which then hands it off to the GPU with the appropriate rendering commands. With the scale effect that is a simple scale command, with the genie effect there is stretching and scaling. All of this is done through Open GL commands.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[Graff]

BTW software updater was already automaticly fetching the update in the background while I read this. It's really nice when you don't have to wait while downloading them. I don't understand what's the big fuss of letting the OS fetch updates in the background, as long as it doesn't install them. I'm not sure but I think software update does only download the important updates...

Yep, only critical updates are automatically downloaded and even that is optional. In fact the whole process is optional. You can tell the operating system to never check for updates on its own and you can choose to ignore updates.

Software Update is pretty flexible and non-obtrusive. The only thing that I wish is that it had an option to allow me to register and de-register other programs for it to check. That way if the author of a program allowed it I could have Software Update automatically check for updates from him in addition to those from Apple.

Re:Or another fix

[valkraider]

You can do this with Safari [macosxhints.com] as well.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that I wish is that it had an option to allow me to register and de-register other programs for it to check. That way if the author of a program allowed it I could have Software Update automatically check for updates from him in addition to those from Apple.

According to ThinkSecret, Apple will provide this capability in a future version of Software Update. It will be limited to select developers, but surely the API will be reenigned in no time.

Site by Site

[chigaze]

OmniWeb allows this in a site by site basis rather than across the board. So I can tell it to treat Slashdot cookies normally but trash Amazon ones after every session.

It's the one thing that could drag me back to OW but I also like my Safari tabs.

Re:Needs a reboot...

[Aqua OS X]

To the user Safari doesn't appear to be integrated into the OS (like MSIE); however, its does access a lot global system resources that other applications frequently use.

Webkit is a fairly major one. Mail, Help, OmniWeb, etc all access this.