Apple updated the Windows and Mac versions of iTunes last week to address more than a dozen vulnerabilities affecting the Expat and SQLite libraries.
iTunes 12.6 for Windows and OS X address seven flaws in SQLite, a cross-platform library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. The latest iTunes versions also resolve ten vulnerabilities in the Expat XML parser library.
iTunes 12.6 updates SQLite to version 3.15.2, released in late November 2016, and Expat to version 2.2.0, released in June 2016.
The CVE identifiers mentioned in Apple’s advisories show that the company has not updated these components for several years.
For example, CVE-2013-7443 was patched in SQLite in February 2014, CVE-2015-3414 was patched in April 2015, and CVE-2016-6153 was fixed in May 2016. Most of the flaws resolved in iTunes can be exploited for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, but some of them could also allow arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.
In the case of Expat, Apple’s advisory mentions some vulnerabilities that were patched in March 2012 with the release of Expat 2.1.0. The security holes in Expat can also be exploited mostly for DoS attacks, but arbitrary code execution may also be possible in some cases.
It’s worth noting that a majority of the iTunes updates released last year patched vulnerabilities affecting the WebKit browser engine. One of the Windows updates, released in July, patched flaws in the libxml2 and libxslt libraries.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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