Submitted by “Among other things, the update for Mac OS X 10.5.8 also fixed an interesting kernel bug related to the way the fcntl call is handled. The bug was identified as CVE-2009-1235 and the first exploit seems to be from June 2008. The variant that I discovered is much simpler and is, as far as I know, the one that really convinced Apple to solve the issue. The oldest kernel I was able to test the problem was Darwin 8.0.1 which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.4 “Tigerâ€. The Tiger was announce in June 28, 2004 but was released to the public on April 29, 2005 and it was advertised as containing more than 200 new features. The bug was closed on August 5, 2009 so the number of days the vulnerability was alive was 1599 days (4 years and 3 months).”
…when you know about it…
If the first exploit was from June 2008 is would make it around 15 months. This is still too long, but to expect a “bug” to be fixed before it has been identified is just stupid.
Of course 4 years 3 months certainly sounds a lot worse than 15 months…
15 months is still pretty bad considering how trivial it is to exploit.
Its amazing that one doesn’t see that exploit; sounds more like a security ‘expert’ digging up dirt on the flavour of the month hoping that the Mac OS X name will raise his own. The flaw exists but why in 15 months hasn’t there been a wide spread deployment of malware taking advantage on what appears to be a very simple flaw?