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Security Businesses Apple

Apple iTunes Security Flaw Discovered? 207

Posted by Zonk from the unfortunate-song dept.
brajesh writes "CNET News.com is reporting that a critical vulnerability has been found in some versions of Apple's popular iTunes that could allow attackers to remotely take over a user's computer, according to a warning issued by eEye Digital Security, a security research firm. The latest iTunes flaw affects all operating systems from Windows XP to Mac OS X, according to the advisory. The discovery of this latest flaw comes days after Apple issued its iTunes 6 for Windows security update."
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Apple iTunes Security Flaw Discovered? More

Apple iTunes Security Flaw Discovered?

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  • So what? And what do we know about this exploit? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:47PM (#14064823)
    Nothing yet, since details of the flaw won't be released by eEye until a patch is released by Apple.

    If someone is wondering "should I be worried", the answer is no; exploits of this nature are usually still theoretical and not being exploited en masse "in the wild". Many of these exploits are explicitly discovered by the security organizations who have released the advisories themselves and are often not necessarily representative of any actual exploit being applied maliciously: the idea is to catch security vulnerabilities before they are actually used maliciously. Further, the exploit in question probably requires the user to specifically visit a malicious web site (other than a port open via Rende..., er I mean, Bonjour, when iTunes Sharing is enabled, I don't know of any other avenue to exploit iTunes). The exploit must, therefore, pass a url and/or file to iTunes, and therefore would very likely require visiting a malicious web site.

    We don't know the details of the exploit, I can still say with it's extremely likely that it is not something that would be able to spontaneously occur simply by using iTunes in a normal fashion.

    This story would more accurately be:

    "Some unknown and unannounced flaw found in a piece of software; fix coming from software vendor"

    Is this news?

    (And it's amusing that if you buy a commercial product [eeye.com] from the vendor issuing the vulnerability, you'll be protected! Not a rip on eEye, who has discovered a good deal of vulnerabilities, but it's not as if many of these security entities themselves don't have an interest in finding "vulnerabilities", no matter how nebulous or unlikely.)
    • We don't know the details of the exploit, I can still say with it's extremely likely that it is not something that would be able to spontaneously occur simply by using iTunes in a normal fashion.

      I can still say it's extremely likely that there is no exploit or flaw at all. Why would anyone believe it? There's no evidence of any kind that any exploit or flaw exists, at all.

      This story would more accurately be: "Some unknown and unannounced flaw found in a piece of software; fix coming from software vendor"

      Close, but more accurate still would be: "Some security company trying to drum up business for itself says its product will protect users from a flaw they claim exists, but offer no details or evidence for."

      • Re:So what? And what do we know about this exploit (Score:4, Insightful)

        by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:02PM (#14064996)
        In fairness, eEye has discovered legitimate vulnerabilities that Apple has actually included in OS and security updates.

        However, I do agree with you.

        And further, it's impossible for this to a "remote execute" vulnerability like the stories based on the extremely vague advisory make it out to be: you can't even talk to iTunes remotely when it's running (unless you have iTunes Sharing enabled, which is available on your local subnet). Therefore, as I've said in another post, this vulnerability *must* be exploited via visiting a malicious web site, which then passes a url and/or file to iTunes. Period. That's the only way this could happen. It's not just something where if you run iTunes, all of a sudden you're vulnerable. Bravo to the way they've positioned it though. They probably floated out some media releases, too. I especially like the last line of the advisory:

        Protection: Blink Endpoint Vulnerability Prevention mitigates any potential exploitation of this vulnerability, without requiring a patch or invasive firewall actions.

        And, for what it's worth, eEye will release the "details", whatever they are, after Apple has patched whatever the issue is.
        • And further, it's impossible for this to a "remote execute" vulnerability like the stories based on the extremely vague advisory make it out to be: you can't even talk to iTunes remotely when it's running (unless you have iTunes Sharing enabled, which is available on your local subnet).

          Well, not impossible. Go to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Remote Apple Events. Turn it on. Now someone can do pretty much what they want with your system. If they have a valid username/password (or you turned on the Mac OS 9 password ... which wouldn't be a security flaw, but part of the design).

          I could, for example, do something like:
          glue Finder '$g->ADDRESS(eppc => Finder => "your.machine.example.com"); $g->obj(item => 1)->delete'
          That would be mean and cruel. And it works over the Internet. And it would also require me to have a username and password on your machine.

          And, for what it's worth, eEye will release the "details", whatever they are, after Apple has patched whatever the issue is.

          And if they do, I will care at that time. It's the height of irresponsibility to release details in this way. The only point is to scare people into buying their product. And therefore I consider it, until actual details emerge, a malicious hoax.
        • Just a thought... what if someone poisoned a podcast? Subscribe to kool sounding podcast, get malicious file via podcast auto-update. Possible attack-vector?
          • Not that I'm in any way an expert, but I tried to do something like that last weekend (for good reasons, I tell ya, good!) and it didn't work. iTunes seems to really check over the file you're grabbing, so unless there's a vulnerability in the mp3 player itself (embedding bad stuff in media files etc), I'm thinkin' it won't work.
      • Why would people believe it? Most likely because the company wouldn't want to be sued for libel [wikipedia.org] by Apple.
    • Many of these exploits are explicitly discovered by the security organizations who have released the advisories themselves and are often not necessarily representative of any actual exploit being applied maliciously: the idea is to catch security vulnerabilities before they are actually used maliciously.

      But they did not catch the Sony rootkit DRM, did they? Or perhaps they did, but kept quiet?

      (And it's amusing that if you buy a commercial product from the vendor issuing the vulnerability, you'll be

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:06PM (#14065045)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • iTunes has a lot more attack surface than than just file sharing via Bonjour.

        Referring to "file sharing via Bonjour" makes as much sense as saying "file sharing via DNS". Bonjour/Rendezvous/ZeroConf is not a file sharing technology. It's multicast DNS. It's used to advertise the availability of a service - any service - to other hosts. Apple includes an Apache module, for instance, that uses Bonjour to advertise the presence of an HTTP server, and Safari uses Bonjour to look for them. But Bonjour's role
    • Of course, then you have to wonder how many of these vulnerabilities are discovered by Black Hats and never release information. Black Hats are probably sitting on hundreds of otherwise undiscovered exploits. There is no reason to believe that only "security organizations" can find exploits like this.

      -matthew

  • Inconceivable! (Score:5, Funny)

    by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:47PM (#14064825)
    A security flaw in an Apple product? That's inconceivable!
  • I just tried to get quicktime today, and now it comes with mandatory itunes.

    (insert wah-wah-wah-waaaaaah sound)

    What is it with companies shooting themselves in the foot this week?

  • Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by andrewman327 ( 635952 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:48PM (#14064839) Homepage Journal
    iTunes is interesting. It's network streaming music feature has been cracked over and over again, as any college student knows. I'm not surprised that someone figured out how to do more malicious things.
    • I'm wondering if this may have been intentional or that Apple may be using it as a way to get more people on to iTunes 6. For 1. giving access to video content and/or 2. Get them using iTunes 6 so that they can't use Jhymn

  • Wow. No Kidding. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IAmTheDave ( 746256 ) <basenamedave-sd@ ... m minus math_god> on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:49PM (#14064840) Homepage Journal

    Wow. Software has flaw allowing remote hackery. This seems to be pretty typical of just about any piece of software written these days (or any days.)

    I guess the question is, do we measure a company and its software by its base security, or by how quickly it responds to a discovered threat? I'm personally inclined to lean towards the second.

    • Wow. Software has flaw allowing remote hackery. This seems to be pretty typical of just about any piece of software written these days (or any days.)

      Except for the thousands of software applications that don't have network functionality! ;)
      • Except for the thousands of software applications that don't have network functionality! ;)

        Oh yeah we usually use those to elevate our privileges once we're in. ;)

    • Re:Wow. No Kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Daniel_Staal ( 609844 ) <DStaal@usa.net> on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:13PM (#14065095)
      I guess the question is, do we measure a company and its software by its base security, or by how quickly it responds to a discovered threat? I'm personally inclined to lean towards the second.

      Both, of course. The first shows how good they are at actually designing and creating software, and the second shows how much they listen to their users/their lawyers/the press. (Take your pick.)

    • I guess the question is, do we measure a company and its software by its base security, or by how quickly it responds to a discovered threat? I'm personally inclined to lean towards the second.

      Both? I mean, yes, we should be forgiving of companies who have taken every reasonable step towards security when a flaw is found, so long as they patch it quickly. However, the process of securing your software shouldn't start at SP2. It should be ongoing during the development.

      So I think the question is, was iT

  • Only as root (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:49PM (#14064852)
    What TFA doesn't point out is that this will only affect OS X users if you're logged in as root.

  • And The Score Is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RapidEye ( 322253 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:51PM (#14064871) Homepage
    Apple Hackers: 1
    Linux Hackers: 2
    Windows Hackers: 134,443,229

    You guys still got a ways to go... =-)

  • Attack vector? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by J0nne ( 924579 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:56PM (#14064929)
    Well, that's not a lot of info.
    All they say is: 'it's vulnerable! run for the hills!'.

    I don't use iTunes, so I don't really care, but what's the vector? Is it a malformed MP3/AAC file? Does iTunes run as a service that listens to a certain port, and can it be attacked through there (probably not likely, as I don't see why a music player should be listening to some port)?

    This lacks information, and you really can't do anything to protect yourself if you don't know how the hell the exploit works...

  • Vulnerable Operating Systems (Score:5, Informative)

    by xWastedMindx ( 636296 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @01:56PM (#14064935) Homepage
    Operating Systems Affected:
    All Microsoft Operatins Systems     no where does this advisory say that OSX is affected, or any other operating system for that matter. This is Windows-Only, as usual.

  • I don't own an iPod, but I still have iTunes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Fox_1 ( 128616 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:06PM (#14065048)
    It's annoying the way that Quicktime installs iTunes software on your machine, and buries it in registry so that it starts every time windows does. If you are looking to just have quicktime I would advise you to try an alternative or download the standalone from here [apple.com].
    • Here is an alternative [free-codecs.com] , I just forgot a quote so the link didn't appear above.
  • or will the Mac OSX iTunes haX0Rs have 733t taste?

    find / | grep -vi "Sigur Rós" | xargs rm -f

  • from TFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by circusboy ( 580130 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:20PM (#14065155)
    This may allow a malicious user on the local system to create an environment where an alternate program will be executed by iTunes.

    Emphasis mine.

    It would seem that remote attacks not possible unless the attacker had direct access to the machine in question first.

    • Re:from TFA (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 )
      Crazy idea: They aren't talking about OurTunes, are they? The program that lets people swipe music out of other users' shared libraries? I mean, that's limited to "local networks", right?

  • critical vulnerability of the week (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:22PM (#14065175)
    This new critical vulnerability was discovered when it was found that someone turned their computer to 'ON' thereby leaving it vulnerable to crackers, hackers, script kiddies and bots. The fact that a human was operating the PC deemed it especially 'critical.'

  • Where does it say it effects OS X? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alpha_Traveller ( 685367 ) * on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:24PM (#14065197) Homepage Journal
    The article says it effects Mac OS X as well as windows, and says the security warning says that too, but:

    "Operating Systems Affected:
    All Microsoft Operatins Systems"

    No mention of anything other than Microsoft OS'es in the provided link to the advisory.
  • I just RTFA, and according to it, ..


    Operating Systems Affected:
    All Microsoft Operatins [sic] Systems


    Unless Microsoft wrote OSX, umm..

  • tragedy (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ohhh!! NOOO!!!

      Someone just exchanged all of my music for the complete ABBA!!!

        AAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!

  • Vector Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @02:46PM (#14065441) Journal

    With nothing more to go on than a couple vague sentences from eEye, here's my guess:

    One major thing that make iTunes different from other music player apps is the Music Store integration, which operates as a limited web browser. On OSX it calls WebKit; on Windows either Apple built a custom minibrower or it calls Explorer. Does anyone know which, BTW?

    In any case, this means that iTunes accepts URLs, specifically itms://[...]. It's also capable (on OSX at least) of launching your default browser and other URL helper apps. I'm guessing that Apple did a bad job validating input, and a malicious itms URL could trick iTunes into launching a remote file as if it were a helper app. Hence the local user context. If this is the case, simply viewing an evil web page (with the itms URL as a redirect/iframe/img/whatever) in most browsers should be sufficient to start the attack.

    Hopefully someone will divulge the facts soon. Let's see if I'm even close.

  • Ah, the old Macdonald exploit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by g0at ( 135364 ) <ben@@@zygoat...ca> on Friday November 18, 2005 @03:05PM (#14065606) Homepage Journal
    Is this a case of eEye E-I/O?

    -b

  • Correction (Score:4, Informative)

    by U2C ( 890363 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @03:36PM (#14065903)
    ": This story initially quoted an incorrect report on the eEye Digital Security Web site saying an iTunes security flaw affected both Windows and Mac operating systems. To clarify, eEye is still testing the flaw on the Mac OS."
  • Waffles, they smell good and tast great.

  • Really severe vulnerability (Score:3, Funny)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @04:57PM (#14066678)
    The way I understand this (from the one line in the CNet report), if you install malicious.exe on Windows or malicious.app on MacOS X, and then you go and rename malicious.exe to iTunes.exe or malicious.app to iTunes.app and then set up things in a certain way, it is possible that some code trying to launch iTunes would launch the malicious app, now called iTunes.

    Be afraid. Be very afraid. The world is coming to an end.
     

  • eEye, eEye, Oh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Warlock7 ( 531656 ) on Friday November 18, 2005 @07:02PM (#14067714)
    ...and sometimes, why bother?

    Nothing to see here, move along. Sounds like this CRITICAL vulnerability isn't much of a vulnerability and isn't very critical...

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