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Apple has delivered its first Mac OS X security update of the year to close 12 vulnerabilities.

The Flash Player plug-in is getting the most work, as it suffers from seven known flaws, according to an advisory released Tuesday. The most serious of the bugs could result in malicious code execution if a user is tricked into viewing a specially crafted website.

In addition, the update corrects vulnerabilities in CoreAudio, CUPS, ImageIO, Image RAW and Open SSL. The latter suffers from a man-in-the-middle flaw that can enable an attacker to “capture data or change the operations performed in sessions protected by SSL.”

The update can be installed through the operating system’s Software Update preferences, described here, or from Apple Downloads.

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A widespread security vulnerability disclosed eight months ago is apparently still lurking in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. A pair of security researchers have released a proof of concept exploit. Maksymilian Arciemowicz and ’sp3x’ of SecurityReason.com have publicly disclosed a proof of concept exploit for a vulnerability in Mac OS X’s dtoa function that converts double-precision values to ASCII strings. They say they reported the issue eight months ago.

The proof of concept merely triggers a memory access error, but such buffer overflow conditions can sometimes be exploited to run arbitrary code. Although the issue has apparently been fixed in FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the researchers imply that the changes have not filtered through to Mac OS X, where it is said to be present in Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). The issue is also said to have been present in NetBSD, Google Chrome, Firefox and other Mozilla projects, Opera, MatLab, and other pieces of software.

The researchers say it may also exist in the Sony PlayStation 3. Apple does not have a particularly good record when it comes to passing on fixes made to open source software incorporated in Mac OS X. One notable exception was the speedy release of an update for the BIND DNS server last August.

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Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. (formerly Apple
Computer, Inc.) for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the “Mac OS” was the integral and unnamed system software first introduced in 1984 with the original Macintosh, usually referred to simply as the System software.

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