Software Engineering Institute

Apple Mail

Mac OS X includes the Mail application (Mail.app) for handling electronic mail.

The Problem

Apple Mail contains a buffer overflow caused by lack of validation on MIME encapsulted files. The buffer overflow may be triggered when an email message with a specially crafted attachment is opened with Mail.

Considerations

According to public reports this vulnerability is introduced by Apple Security Update 2006-001.

Exploit code for this vulnerability is publicly available.

By convincing a user to open a specially crafted attachment, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running Mail.

Install an update
This issue is corrected in Apple Security Update 2006-002.

Do not open attachments from untrusted sources

To protect against Only open email attachemnts from trusted or known sources.