Apple + Security & Privacy

Apple has been unlucky with QuickTime. The media software used, on Mac OS X and Windows, to play back music and videos, has often been the object of security vulnerabilities. From January 2005 to the present, Apple has issued a total of 15 QuickTime security updates (and this doesn’t count security fixes that are rolled into larger operating system updates).

Apple’s latest QuickTime security update contains, as eWeek reports, “anti-hacker features” to hopefully cut down on the number of vulnerabilities in the software. The Mac OS X version of QuickTime gets stack buffer safety checking and “function call hardening, which should prevent some buffer overflows”, two new features that should make the software more robust.

Time will tell whether this makes a difference, but recent experience has shown that QuickTime is Apple’s Achilles heel.