Fergie's Tech Blog

Apple Security Patch Flubs DNS Fix

Thomas Claburn writes on InformationWeek:

Apple on Thursday released Security Update 2008-005, a collection of 17 fixes for security vulnerabilities in its Mac OS X operating system.

Among the fixes is what looks to be a patch for the DNS cache poisoning vulnerability that security experts spent most of July warning about.

But according to security researcher Swa Frantzen from the SANS Internet Storm Center, Apple's fix hasn't quite done the trick.

"Apple might have fixed some of the more important parts for servers, but is far from done yet as all the clients linked against a DNS client library still need to get the workaround for the protocol weakness," said Frantzen in a blog post.

The issue appears to be that despite Apple's patch, BIND under OS X is incrementing the ports it uses to communicate DNS information in a predictable pattern.

posted by Fergie @ 8/01/2008 12:33:00 PM