Due to a security engineering oversight, the SSL library from KDE, which Konqueror uses, doesn't check whether an intermediate certificate for a connection is signed by the certificate authority as safe for the purpose, but accepts it when it is signed. This makes it possible for anyone with a valid VeriSign SSL site certificate to forge any other VeriSign SSL site certificate, and abuse Konqueror users. A local root exploit using artsd has been discovered which exploited an insecure use of a format string. The exploit wasn't working on a Debian system since artsd wasn't running setuid root. Neither artsd nor artswrapper need to be setuid root anymore since current computer systems are fast enough to handle the audio data in time. These problems have been fixed in version 2.2.2-13.woody.2 for the current stable distribution (woody). The old stable distribution (potato) is not affected, since it doesn't contain KDE packages. The unstable distribution (sid) is not yet fixed, but new packages are expected in the future, the fixed version will be version 2.2.2-14 or higher. We recommend that you upgrade your kdelibs and libarts packages and restart Konqueror.
Due to a security engineering oversight, the SSL library from KDE, which Konqueror uses, doesn't check whether an intermediate certificate for a connection is signed by the certificate authority as safe for the purpose, but accepts it when it is signed. This makes it possible for anyone with a valid VeriSign SSL site certificate to forge any other VeriSign SSL site certificate, and abuse Konqueror users.
A local root exploit using artsd has been discovered which exploited an insecure use of a format string. The exploit wasn't working on a Debian system since artsd wasn't running setuid root. Neither artsd nor artswrapper need to be setuid root anymore since current computer systems are fast enough to handle the audio data in time.
These problems have been fixed in version 2.2.2-13.woody.2 for the current stable distribution (woody). The old stable distribution (potato) is not affected, since it doesn't contain KDE packages. The unstable distribution (sid) is not yet fixed, but new packages are expected in the future, the fixed version will be version 2.2.2-14 or higher.
We recommend that you upgrade your kdelibs and libarts packages and restart Konqueror.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.
Vulmon