Apple Fixes Vulnerabilities in Safari, iOS, OS X, Apple TV

Updates containing fixes for security vulnerabilities were made available by Apple on Monday for iOS, Safari, OS X Mavericks and Apple TV.

iPhone and iPad users can update their device’s operating systems to iOS 7.1.2, which in addition to some bug fixes also addresses 44 security holes. As part of the latest release, Apple has updated the certificate trust policy for iPhone 4 and later, iPod touch and later, and iPad 2 and later.

Flaws have been addressed in iOS features and components such as the kernel, CoreGraphics, launchd, Activation Lock, the lock screen, mail, the Safari Web browser, the virtual assistant Siri, secure transport mechanisms, the open source rendering engine WebKit, and the Find My Phone option in the settings menu.

Dima Kovalenko of codedigging.com, cunzhang from Adlab of Venustech, Ian Beer of Google Project Zero, mblsec, Erling Ellingsen of Facebook, Andreas Kurtz of NESO Security Labs, miaubiz, cloudfuzzer, banty, Atte Kettunen of OUSPG, the Google Chrome Security Team and others have been credited in Apple’s advisory for reporting these issues.

With the release of OS X Mavericks v10.9.4 and Security Update 2014-003, Apple has updated the certificate trust policy, and has addressed 19 vulnerabilities in components like Thunderbolt, kernel graphics drivers, launchd, IOReporting, IOGraphicsFamily, IOAcceleratorFamily, the Intel graphics driver, iBooks, the Dock and cURL.

The security advisory published for the OS X Mavericks update credits Thijs Alkemade of The Adium Project, Catherine (winocm),  Ben Langfeld of Mojo Lingo LLC, Ian Beer of Google Project Zero, cunzhang from Adlab of Venustech, Steve Dunham, Chaitanya (SegFault) working with iDefense VCP, and an anonymous researcher working with HP’s Zero Day Initiative.

Just over a month after it released Safari 7.0.4 and Safari 6.1.4, Apple made available on Monday Safari 7.0.5 and Safari 6.1.5. A total of 12 security flaws affecting WebKit have been addressed with the latest releases. The vulnerabilities could lead to unexpected application termination, arbitrary code execution, disclosure of local file content, and domain name spoofing.

Erling Ellingsen of Facebook,  Aaron Sigel of vtty.com, Renata Hodovan of the University of Szeged, miaubiz, the Google Chrome Security Team, and Wushi of Keen Cloud Tech (Keen Team) have reported the issues to Apple. It’s worth noting that Safari 7.0.5 is included in the latest Mavericks v10.9.4 update.

As far as Apple TV is concerned, a total of 35 vulnerabilities have been fixed with the release of version 6.2. Most of the flaws are the same ones that have been fixed in iOS and Mavericks, but there is one issue that’s specific to Apple TV. A bug affecting second generation and later Apple TVs could have been exploited by a signed-in user to complete an iTunes Store transaction without providing a valid password when prompted.