CVE-2007-5859 in Mac OS X
Summary
by MITRE
Unspecified vulnerability in Safari RSS in Apple Mac OS X 10.4.11 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application termination) or execute arbitrary code via a crafted feed: URL that triggers memory corruption.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 06/07/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2007-5859 represents a critical memory corruption flaw within Apple Mac OS X 10.4.11's Safari RSS feed processing functionality. This issue resides in the application's handling of crafted feed URLs that contain malformed or maliciously constructed data. The vulnerability manifests when Safari attempts to parse RSS feeds from remote sources, specifically during the memory allocation and data processing phases of feed interpretation. The flaw allows remote attackers to manipulate the parsing logic through carefully constructed feed content that triggers buffer overflows or other memory corruption conditions.
The technical nature of this vulnerability aligns with CWE-121, which describes stack-based buffer overflow conditions, and CWE-122, which covers heap-based buffer overflow scenarios. These classifications indicate that the vulnerability stems from improper memory management during RSS feed parsing operations. The attack vector involves delivering a maliciously crafted RSS feed URL to a victim's Safari browser, which then processes the feed and triggers the memory corruption. The exploitation results in two potential outcomes: either application termination through crash conditions or arbitrary code execution through memory corruption that can be leveraged to inject and run malicious payloads.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability presents significant risk to Mac OS X users who regularly access RSS feeds from untrusted sources. The remote nature of the attack means that users can be compromised simply by visiting a malicious website that hosts the crafted feed URL or by having their browsers automatically fetch feeds from compromised sources. The denial of service aspect can disrupt user productivity through application crashes, while the arbitrary code execution capability provides attackers with persistent access to affected systems. The vulnerability affects the core browser functionality and demonstrates the inherent risks associated with parsing external data feeds without proper input validation and memory safety checks.
Mitigation strategies for CVE-2007-5859 should focus on immediate patching of the affected Mac OS X version, as Apple would have released a security update addressing this specific memory corruption issue. System administrators should implement network-level filtering to block access to known malicious RSS feed sources and consider disabling automatic RSS feed fetching in Safari settings. The vulnerability also highlights the importance of input sanitization and memory safety practices in web browser development, aligning with ATT&CK technique T1059.007 for command and scripting interpreter usage and T1203 for exploitation for privilege escalation. Organizations should maintain updated threat intelligence feeds to identify malicious RSS content and implement browser security policies that limit the execution of potentially harmful content. Regular security assessments of browser extensions and plugins should also be conducted to prevent additional attack vectors that could exploit similar memory corruption vulnerabilities.