About the security content of Mac EFI Security Update 2015-001

This document describes the security content of Mac EFI Security Update 2015-001.

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Where possible, CVE IDs are used to reference the vulnerabilities for further information.

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Mac EFI Security Update 2015-001

  • EFI

    Available for: OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5, OS X Mavericks v10.9.5

    Impact: A malicious application with root privileges may be able to modify EFI flash memory

    Description: An insufficient locking issue existed with EFI flash when resuming from sleep states. This issue was addressed through improved locking.

    CVE-ID

    CVE-2015-3692 : Trammell Hudson of Two Sigma Investments, Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg of LegbaCore LLC, Pedro Vilaça

  • EFI

    Available for: OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5, OS X Mavericks v10.9.5

    Impact: A malicious application may induce memory corruption to escalate privileges

    Description: A disturbance error, also known as Rowhammer, exists with some DDR3 RAM that could have led to memory corruption. This issue was mitigated by increasing memory refresh rates.

    CVE-ID

    CVE-2015-3693 : Mark Seaborn and Thomas Dullien of Google, working from original research by Yoongu Kim et al (2014)

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