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December 3, 2006

AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Flaw

The Month of Kernel Bugs (MoKB) project finished out November with a undisclosed flaw for AirPort Extreme: They had previously noted a number of Wi-Fi flaws, including a major one for AirPort Card users, now patched by Apple. In this case, they write that they communicated the flaw to Apple before announcing its existence, and haven't disclosed the full parameters of it. It's a similar flaw to others that have appeared, in which the kernel can be made to panic (crashing the computer), among other potential implications they're not disclosing, when improperly formed messages are sent to an AirPort Extreme Card. The security posting mentions "beacon frames" without elaboration. These frames are messages sent by an access point or base station that describe its parameters to an adapter that is looking to associate with a local network, or gathering information about the networks around it.

It's likely that Apple would be able to patch this quickly, as their September update covered a general category of malformed frames. The security team is probably now well aware of how to fix this kind of exploit. I'll guess we'll see an updated by Dec. 10 unless Apple deems this a much worse or much less severe problem than how it's being described now.

Apple Patches AirPort Weaknesses

Apple released security updates for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger) that fix the AirPort Card weakness: While there was no widespread (or even narrowly spread) information about this exploit in the original AirPort Card's drivers being taken advantage of in the wild, Apple has patched the flaw within a few weeks of its announcement. The flaw would allow a nearby attacker to crash a Mac with an AirPort Card under the right circumstances (see previous post for more details).

Security Update 2006-007 has six different versions, but the AirPort Card was only ever available for PowerPC computers--Mac models released between 1999 and 2002 could accept the card--but Intel-based Macs include fixes to other bugs and weaknesses in this package. The security update is available in client and server flavors to patch 10.3.9 and 10.4.8.

You can download the patches manually or simply use Software Update from the Apple menu to get the appropriate release for your system.