MacBook Air Hacked In Just Two Minutes

ISE security researchers Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel used a zero-day vulnerability in Apple's Safari 3.1 Web browser to hack the MacBook Air in just two minutes.

The researchers from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) were participating in the "PWN to OWN" competition at the CanSecWest security conference, which began Wednesday in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Contest participants had their choice of trying to hack an Apple MacBook Air running OS X 10.5.2, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, or a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1. During the first day, when attacks were limited to network attacks on the operating system, no one managed to compromise any of the systems.

That changed Thursday when attacks on default client-side applications -- Web browser, e-mail, IM -- were allowed. Using an attack code already set up on a Web site the ISE team "tricked" the judges using the MacBook into visiting the site and retrieving a file.

The team won $10,000 from security firm TippingPoint Technologies for compromising the MacBook Air.

The undisclosed vulnerability in Safari 3.1 has been shown to Apple and no further information about it will be revealed until Apple can issue an update, TippingPoint said.

The contest rules stipulated that winners immediately sign a nondisclosure agreement relating to their technique, so that the vulnerability could be disclosed to the vendor, and TippingPoint said Apple has been informed of the vulnerability.

MacBook Air Recieves More Competition

Miniaturized versions of the Intel Core 2 Duo processors specially developed for Apple's new MacBook Air will soon be used by other PC vendors in systems. A move that will most likely be creating competition for what has been labeled as the world's lightest and thinnest notebook.

The MacBook Air comes with miniaturized version of Intel Core 2 Duo Merom family processors. The processors unning at either 1.6 GHz or 1.8GHz, have been shrunk by up to 60% compared to other Merom processors.

The companies' names have yet to be released, but the chip most likely will bring smaller and lighter notebooks that will compete in size and performance with the MacBook Air.

At the Intel Developer Forum last year, Intel talked about shrinking the size of chips by up to 60% for its next-generation Montevina mobile platform, which will include the new Penryn processors manufactured using the 45nm process. The small form-factor chips will be released shortly after the normal-size chips, due to ship by the middle of 2008.