A denial of service attack has been disclosed in the latest version of Apple iOS.

The attack targets Safari in iOS 5.1.1 and a proof of concept was published online.

Alienvault security researcher Alberto Ortega said the attack may also affect previous versions of the Apple operating system.

The attack was successfully demonstrated on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Ortega said the error was a “step to achieve a real exploitation”.

“iOS has a lot of mitigations to avoid successful exploitation,” Ortega said. “This software has errors and holes but you will need to bypass those hard mitigations and find more weaknesses  to have something “usable’.”

Ortega reported the error to Apple at the time of disclosure but had no response from the notoriously security silent company.

“When JavaScript function match() gets a big buffer as parameter the browser unexpectedly crashes. By extension, the function search() is affected too,” Ortega said in the advisory.

Source: http://www.crn.com.au/News/302620,dos-crashes-updated-ipads-iphones.aspx