You may remember some weeks back the whole brouhaha over a supposed flaw in wireless drivers discovered by David Maynor and Jon Ellch of SecureWorks. For the most part, we here at Deep Thought ignored the whole issue, but some corners of the blogosphere dealt with the issues related to it all. Well pull out fire-retardant suits everyone, because the happy fun times are here again!

A zero-day flaw has been discovered in the drivers for Apple’s Airport drivers (note: 802.11b, not the later 802.11g) included with some machines sold between 1999 and 2003. According to one site that goes into detail about the issue, the drivers are “vulnerable to a remote memory corruption flaw.” A proof-of-concept and more details are provided (the proof-of-concept seems to be a jab at a certain daring tech writer--yeah, really classy, guys). Again, this does not affect any currently-shipping Macs, nor any machines Apple shipped after 2003.

Apple made the following statement to Brian Krebs of the Washington Post:

“We were recently made aware of this security issue in our first generation AirPort card, which has not shipped since October 2003. This issue affects a small percentage of previous generation AirPort enabled Macs and does not affect currently shipping or AirPort Extreme enabled Macs. We are currently investigating the issue.”

George Ou also posted a blog entry entitled ”Zero-day exploit released for unpatched Apple Airport Driver!”--I’ll let you the reader analyze Ou’s use of the exclaimation point in the title. The Macalope fired back with this zinger. John Gruber has yet to write a full-fledged article on the issue, but he is covering this issue extensively in his Linked List.

Now I’m not going to get into this--others seem to have it covered--but I can’t help but notice that so far the cast of characters is largely the same as it was during the previous wireless bug controversey: Ou, Krebs, Gruber, Macalope.

Note: The site that uncovered this bug is Month of Kernel Bugs, a site that will uncover one bug from an operating system every day this month.