Vulnerability Note VU#145486

Apple Cocoa applications vulnerable to denial of service via malformed TIFF image

Overview

Apple Mac OS X applications using the Cocoa environment may quit due to an unhandled exception in TIFF image handling routines.

I. Description

Mac OS X applications may take advantage of the Cocoa programming environment, which is described by Apple as "an object-oriented application environment designed specifically for developing Mac OS X-only native applications." The NXSeek() routine may seek to an offset outside of the image when handling malformed TIFF files. This raises an exception that is not handled and as such may cause the application to quit resulting in a denial-of-service condition.

II. Impact

An unauthenticated attacker may craft a malformed TIFF file that may cause an application to quit unexpectedly if the TIFF file is opened within the application. This may be triggered remotely if the application is handling remotely submitted data such as electronic mail.

III. Solution

Apply An Update

Apple has addressed the issue in Security Update 2005-005.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Notified	Date Updated
Apple Computer Inc.	Vulnerable	5-May-2005

References

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301528
http://secunia.com/advisories/15227/

Credit

Thanks to Apple Product Security for reporting this vulnerability, who in turn credit Henrik Dalgaard of Echo One with reporting the vulnerability.

This document was written by Ken MacInnis.

Other Information

Date Public:	2005-05-03
Date First Published:	2005-05-09
Date Last Updated:	2005-05-11
CERT Advisory:
CVE-ID(s):	CAN-2005-1330
NVD-ID(s):	CAN-2005-1330
US-CERT Technical Alerts:
Metric:	1.60
Document Revision:	6

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