iTunes 6.0 vulnerability

Posted by Jonathan

Airscanner released a security advisory about a iTunes 6.0 shared music Denial of Service/Spoofing/Flooding/Abuse vulnerability.

From the advisory:

Risk Level:
Low: Denial of service (Shared Music anonymous forced disconnect) and list abuse attacks are both merely annoying to iTunes users.
Medium: Shared Music lists from various users can be renamed and swapped, thus creating an environment in which you can’t be sure to whom you are connecting.

Summary:
iTunes is a popular service allowing you to play music, buy music, download music, share music, create playlists, etc.; it includes a video player and other features: http://www.itunes.com
The iTunes Shared Music feature allows users on a network to create playlists from songs on their computer and to share them on the network. When you create a new list and enable sharing, other iTunes users will see your lists under the Shared Music list, unless they change their preferences from the default settings. We discovered that it is possible to create spoofed Shared Music entries, to rename existing entries, to disconnect existing entries, and to re-initiate existing lists. We can also kill an existing stream without authorization via an anonymous packet.

Workaround:
Disable ‘Look for shared music’ option under the Sharing tab in Preferences.

There is also a Flash demo here.

With Apple becoming more and more popular, security researchers are more interested in OS X applications.

iTunes RSS enclose surprise

Posted by Jonathan

When I downloaded the new episode of the DrunkAndRetired podcast in iTunes I discovered that iTunes can also download non-mp3/AAC RSS enclosures like PDFs.

iTunes RSS enclosure

When you double-click on the small book graphic Preview will open the attached PDF.

Seems nice at first but I do not know what the security implications are (just remember the recent vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat). What if you can also attach executable files to RSS feeds and iTunes will open them for you?

The thing is that you do not know what kind of file is behind this symbol, what if Word files are also included?

I have to test this feature with some other enclosures and find out what kind of nice surprises are hidden here…