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Snow Leopard users: Turn off automatic date and time in System Preferences immediately

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/12/apple-automatically-patches-macs-to-fix-sev ere-ntp-security-flaw/


When exploited, the NTP flaw can cause buffer overflows that allow remote attackers to execute code on your system.

What this means is that, if you allow date and time to be set automatically by outside servers, you risk having your computer taken over.


This is a critical issue, it's being exploited as we speak, and Apple has not provided the update to Snow Leopard users, only to 10.8/Mountain Lion and above. I strongly doubt Apple will ever get around to issuing an update for Snow Leopard, or they would have already. Chances of that happening are close to zero

Posted on Dec 23, 2014 4:34 PM

Reply
175 replies

Jan 1, 2015 10:23 AM in response to shiekh

shiekh wrote:


Could you limit this installer so it won't install on a PPC Mac?


I built an installer for 10.5 PPC


http://www.cubeowner.com/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=14866&view=findpost&p=104 496

Why should flatsixracer do that? Don't know if his is suitable for 10.5/PPC or not, but if it is, why should he arbitrarily limit the way it can be used. Just because you built one? Doesn't make any sense. Have I misunderstood what you meant to say?

Jan 1, 2015 10:59 AM in response to WZZZ

My bad, I did not explain myself well.


His are Intel binaries and should not be installed on a PPC;

that is the reason I went ahead and did the same for the PPC,

or I would have just used his installer. Actually I tried, and

that is how I found out they were not universal binaries.


I realize now how my wording could cause confusion; my

apologies.

Jan 2, 2015 12:26 PM in response to WZZZ

WZZZ wrote:


Someone else mentioned this earlier. I have been searching, in vain, for any feedback or reviews. Have you used it?


I woulld stay away from them. Go with what you know works here. Like flatsixracer's installer it does install 4.2.8 (presumably with its requisite patch file for ntp_io.c) but it doesn't install ntpd-wrapper to correct the bad sntp -v call nor does it install the ntp-restrict.conf (which I suppose you could view as "optional" since that only addresses some pesky system.log messages).


As best as I can tell this thread is the only place that took the sntp error seriously. I don't see it discussed anywhere else.


By the way, not sure how important it is since I don't know if anyone would care, but that installer and flatsixracer's installer do not install the (updated?) man pages and doc's that would normally be installed with a 4.2.8 build. In my own builds I do let them them get installed.

Jan 2, 2015 4:10 PM in response to xyzzy-xyzzy

Re. the "edge case" crash scenario we have been discussing, someone elsewhere wrote :


Keep in mind that gcc normally produces executables that are optimized for the system it's being compiled on. As a result the edge cases could be a particular CPU that doesn't implement a particular instruction that flatsixracer's CPU does implement.

Wonder what you think of that? And by the way, I used the instructions at MI to do the 4.2.8 update (compiling from Xcode 3.2) on one of my clones. Don't see the sntp -v error and I am seeing there what appears to be the ntp-restrict.conf as well. The explanation might be that, perhaps, it didn't fully overwrite flatsixracers' rev 4, which I had first installed, but no idea why that would have happened, nor does it seem likely, since I took it all the way.


Jan 1 10:49:09 **** ntpd[240]: ntpd 4.2.8@1.3265-o Thu Jan 1 15:43:00 UTC 2015 (2): Starting
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: ntpd 4.2.8@1.3265-o Thu Jan 1 15:43:00 UTC 2015 (2): Starting
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Command line: /usr/sbin/ntpd -c /private/etc/ntp-restrict.conf -n -g -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -f /var/db/ntp.drift
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: proto: precision = 1.000 usec (-20)
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen and drop on 0 v6wildcard [::]:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen and drop on 1 v4wildcard 0.0.0.0:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen normally on 2 lo0 [::1]:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen normally on 3 lo0 [fe80::1%1]:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: setsockopt IPV6_MULTICAST_IF 0 for fe80::1%1 fails: Can't assign requested address
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen normally on 4 lo0 127.0.0.1:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** ntpd[240]: setsockopt IPV6_MULTICAST_IF 0 for fe80::1%1 fails: Can't assign requested address
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listen normally on 5 en1 192.168.1.47:123
Jan 1 10:49:09 **** org.ntp.ntpd[240]: 1 Jan 10:49:09 ntpd[240]: Listening on routing socket on fd #26 for interface updates

Jan 2, 2015 4:37 PM in response to xyzzy-xyzzy

No more time to edit: In case you are curious about the (2) in ntpd 4.2.8@1.3265-o Thu Jan 1 15:43:00 UTC 2015 (2), thinking that it might not have overwritten the rev4 installer from flatsix on the first run through, I reran the entire procedure a second time.

Is it possible that it left might have remnants from flatsixracer's installer?

Jan 2, 2015 4:49 PM in response to WZZZ

WZZZ wrote:


Re. the "edge case" crash scenario we have been discussing, someone elsewhere wrote :


Keep in mind that gcc normally produces executables that are optimized for the system it's being compiled on. As a result the edge cases could be a particular CPU that doesn't implement a particular instruction that flatsixracer's CPU does implement.

Wonder what you think of that?


Except that like you, I build my own ntp files on my own system (I have Xcode 3.2.6) so that argument doesn't apply for me either. Of course that doesn't mean that the gcc compiler itself doesn't have a code generation bug (it does compile the code with -O2 optimization level enabled) but I really really don't believe that :-)


Also, by the way, the crash report you showed earlier, which I said was the same as mine, was not an ILLEGAL INSTRUCTION report. It appears to be for a pointer attempting to use a chunk of freed memory. That's what lead me to believe it was a rare edge condition. Some condition drove it down a path where it freed a pointer but some other place thought the pointer was still valid, or maybe it attempted to free the same pointer twice. That makes it a coding bug in my book! And unless the code authors know their code really well (you would hope), and/or this happens more often to others, and the edge condition can be fully understood, errors of this kind can be a b*tch for fix.


And by the way, I used the instructions at MI to do the 4.2.8 update (compiling from Xcode 3.2) on one of my clones. Don't see the sntp -v error and I am seeing there what appears to be the ntp-restrict.conf as well. The explanation might be that, perhaps, it didn't fully overwrite flatsixracers' rev 4, which I had first installed, but no idea why that would have happened, nor does it seem likely, since I took it all the way.


I believe I asked you about that earlier in this thread (i.e., where was the -v error report in your system.log?). It would be (have been) easy to check, i.e., just look at the sntp command line in the /usr/libexit/ntpd-wrapper file. You must have the updated one with the sntp -K ... fix.

Snow Leopard users: Turn off automatic date and time in System Preferences immediately

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