Secret Weapon Labs

In keeping track of the pulse of the Mac OS X Security updates, I recently found c/o Wishingline.com which found a security bug c/o Security Focus, a recent discovery of a possible exploit in OS X whereby a user can gain Admin access. I’ve quoted the post below:

The Bug
The bug involves an application gaining root privileges by not having to explicitly authenticate itself due to the 5 minute sudo authentication window — you don’t have to re-authenticate within a 5 minute period of authenticating as an admin user. There’s also a problem related to where the authentication attempts are logged being readable by all users on the system, not just admin users.
The Fix

Fire up the Terminal application - this one is all command-line.

• Open up the sudoers file in a new window via: sudo pico /etc/sudoers.
• Go to the Defaults section of the file and add the following bits:

  Defaults:ALL !syslog
  Defaults:ALL logfile=/var/log/secure.log
  Defaults:ALL timestamp_timeout=0
  Defaults:ALL tty_tickets

  Adding these items will change where authentication attempts are logged, the sudo timeout will be set to zero instead of the 5-minute default and the password grace period will be set to a local tty session and not globally.

• Save the file and run the next command to verify your changes: sudo visudo -c.

You can now rest a little more securely. Let’s hope Apple does something about this in one of the upcoming updates (10.3.9 or Tiger).
Update

I meant to reiterate that this is not an active problem in any way at this point in time. There’s no need to panic or overreact…