Apple has released Safari 7.0.4 and Safari 6.1.4 to address a total of 22 vulnerabilities affecting WebKit, the open source rendering engine that powers the popular Web browser.
One of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2014-1346, was found and disclosed by Erling Ellingsen of Facebook. The flaw was caused by an encoding issue in the handling of unicode characters in URLs.
“A malicious site can send messages to a connected frame or window in a way that might circumvent the receiver’s origin check,” Apple noted in its advisory.
The other 21 security holes fixed by Apple with the release of Safari 7.0.4 and Safari 6.1.4 are memory corruption issues that could lead to arbitrary code execution or unexpected application termination. In order to exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would have to convince the victim to visit a maliciously crafted website.
The patched vulnerabilities have the following CVE identifiers: CVE-2013-2875, CVE-2013-2927, CVE-2014-1323, CVE-2014-1324, CVE-2014-1326, CVE-2014-1327, CVE-2014-1329, CVE-2014-1330, CVE-2014-1331, CVE-2014-1333, CVE-2014-1334, CVE-2014-1335, CVE-2014-1336, CVE-2014-1337, CVE-2014-1338, CVE-2014-1339, CVE-2014-1341, CVE-2014-1342 , CVE-2014-1343, CVE-2014-1344 and CVE-2014-1731.
The security holes were discovered by Apple’s internal team, miaubiz, cloudfuzzer, banty, Atte Kettunen of OUSPG, Ian Beer of Google Project Zero, an anonymous member of the Blink development community, and the Google Chrome Security Team.
Google’s Chrome Security Team identified nine of the vulnerabilities.
“It’s good to see Apple itself proactively finding and fixing holes, together with a lot of help from Google, historically a big user of the WebKit core that’s used in many browsers, most notably Safari,” noted Paul Ducklin, head of technology for Asia Pacific at Sophos.
It’s worth noting that two of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2013-2875 and CVE-2013-2927, are fairly old and were discovered by miaubiz and cloudfuzzer last year. Google patched the flaws in Chrome back in July 2013 and October 2013.