Apple Patches 45 Bugs In Massive Security Update

Apple has issued a security update for Mac OS X that fixes 45 security bugs.

The security update released Tuesday patches several zero-day vulnerabilities, along with other bugs in Apple's software and bugs in third-party software, including Adobe Flash Player and MySQL Server. Apple has issued several patch releases in the past few months.

The latest update, which is 8 Mbytes, is aimed at systems running Mac OS X 10.3.9. Patches are available for client and server systems.

Seven of the bugs being patched were published during the Month of Apple Bugs in January, and five were released during the Month of Kernel Bugs last November.

The update addresses a wide variety of flaws, including a buffer overflow in ColorSync, Apple's color management technology. Because of the vulnerability, if a user is enticed to open an image that has malicious code embedded in it, an attacker can trigger the overflow, which could crash the application or even allow remote code execution.

The update also patches a bug in Crash Reporter, which is an Apple program that logs information about all crashed programs. The vulnerability allows a local admin user to obtain high-level system privileges.

Also fixed in the update are several vulnerabilities within Disk Images, which are files containing the content and structure of any storage medium. The flaws generally lead to an application crash or arbitrary code execution.

Adobe's Flash Player has been updated to version 9.0.28.0 to fix a potential vulnerability that could allow HTTP request-splitting attacks, which are Web application vulnerabilities that are often used to perform cross-scripting attacks.

There are multiple vulnerabilities in MySQL. The most serious one is an arbitrary code execution, according to Apple. MySQL is being updated from version 4.1.13 to 4.1.22.

Apple's Security Update can be pushed down to users through the Software Update feature in Mac OS X, or it can be downloaded manually from Apple Downloads.