14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has released new versions of its Safari browser for Windows and Mac addressing a number of 56 vulnerabilities many of which allow for remote code execution.
As usually, a large number of vulnerabilities were patched in the WebKit layout engine and were reported downstream by researchers working through Google's Chromium Security Rewards program.
The new versions are 5.0.6 and 5.1 which contains additional security and privacy technologies like sandboxing, private autofill and do-not-track (DNT) header. On the Mac platform, Safari 5.1 comes installed by default with the new Mac OS X Lion.
Many of the vulnerabilities patched in these two releases can be exploited in drive-by download attacks to infect users with malware.
Such attacks are usually transparent to the victims and have long been used to target Windows users. Even though Mac owners have recently been the target of malware attacks also, those were mostly based on social engineering and required user interaction.
Three of the patched vulnerabilities were located in the CFNetwork component (CVE-2010-1420, CVE-2010-1383, CVE-2011-0214), one in ColorSync (CVE-2011-0200), one in CoreFoundation (CVE-2011-0201), one in CoreGraphics (CVE-2011-0202), one in International Components for Unicode (CVE-2011-0206), four in ImageIO (CVE-2011-0206, CVE-2011-0241, CVE-2011-0215, CVE-2011-0204), one in libxslt (CVE-2011-0195), one in libxml (CVE-2011-0216), two in Safari (CVE-2011-0217, CVE-2011-0219) and the rest in WebKit.
Safari 5.1's sandboxing feature marks the second time when such technology was implemented in a browser after Google Chrome and will probably mark a trend in browser development. Mozilla is aiming for a similar implementation, but its much harder to port an entire code base to such a technology than to build it in from the start.
The latest version of Safari for Mac can be downloaded from here. The latest version of Safari for Windows can be downloaded from here.