KDE Security Advisory: kfax libtiff vulnerabilities
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KDE Security Advisory: kfax libtiff vulnerabilities
Original Release Date: 2004-12-09
URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20041209-2.txt
0. References
CAN-2004-0803
CAN-2004-0804
CAN-2004-0886
1. Systems affected:
All KDE releases earlier than KDE 3.3.2.
2. Overview:
Chris Evans and others discovered multiple vulnerabilities
in the libtiff library. The Common Vulnerabilities and
Exposures project assigned CAN-2004-0803 to this issue.
kfax, a small utility for displaying fax files, contains
for historic reasons a private copy of libtiff. Therefore
it is vulnerable to these issues as well.
kfax and the kfax KPart are invoked by KMail or Konqueror
for viewing .g3 files.
For the active KDE maintenance branches, which are
KDE 3.2.x and KDE 3.3.x, this problem has been solved by
removing the private copy of libtiff. In KDE 3.2.x, kfax
will use the tiff2ps and fax2tiff utilities at runtime as
backend. In KDE 3.3.x the code requiring libtiff or any other
runtime dependencies has been replaced by a native solution
that is unaffected by the mentioned vulnerabilities.
Due to the complexity of the change, no simple diff is
provided. The problems have been addressed in the KDE 3.3.2
release.
As a workaround, you can remove the kfax binary and the
kfaxpart.la KPart from your system to be on the safe
side.
3. Impact:
Specially crafted fax files can trigger buffer overflows
in libtiff and execute arbitrary code.
4. Solution:
Source code updates have been made available which fix these
vulnerabilities. Contact your OS vendor / binary package provider
for information about how to obtain updated binary packages.
5. Patch:
No patches are being made available due to complexity of the change.
6. Time line and credits:
13/10/2004 KDE Security Team alerted by Than Ngo
28/10/2004 private libtiff fork removed from CVS, updated
packages finished.
XX/11/2004 Regression fixing, several refinements.
09/12/2004 Public announcement
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