Apple's OS X is First OS to be Hacked at This Year's Pwn2Own
The conception that Apple, Inc. computers running OS X are magically more secure than Windows computers was dealt another setback this week. Using a flaw in Apple's pre-installed first-party Safari browser, it took French security pro Chaouki Bekrar merely 5 seconds to hijack the unwitting MacBook at the CanSecWest Conference's pwn2own contest in Vancouver, British Columbia.
On a most basic level the attack exploited Apple's weak memory protections in OS X Snow Leopard. Microsoft, more popular and more commonly attacked, includes two critical types of memory protection -- data execution prevention and robust address space layout optimization (ASLR) -- both of which attempt to prevent memory injection attacks. By contrast, Snow Leopard only supports ASLR and the implementation is badly botched according to hackers.
The attack also exploited poor coding in Apple's branch of WebKit, which features many bugs and security flaws. While Apple's WebKit branch, which powers its Safari browser, shares a certain amount of code with Google's WebKit browser Chrome, Google's Chrome like last year escaped unscathed by hacking, in spite of the company offering a bigger $20,000 reward. But this might have been due to a rule stating that a contestant needed to hack Chrome and escape the sandbox using vulnerabilities in the Google-written code.
