freetype vulnerability

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2016-10244  

FreeType could be made to crash or run programs if it opened a specially crafted font file.

It was discovered that FreeType did not correctly handle certain malformed font files. If a user were tricked into using a specially crafted font file, a remote attacker could cause FreeType to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.

20 March 2017

freetype vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 16.10
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Summary

FreeType could be made to crash or run programs if it opened a specially crafted font file.

Software Description

  • freetype - FreeType 2 is a font engine library

Details

It was discovered that FreeType did not correctly handle certain malformed font files. If a user were tricked into using a specially crafted font file, a remote attacker could cause FreeType to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 16.10
libfreetype6 - 2.6.3-3ubuntu1.1
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
libfreetype6 - 2.6.1-0.1ubuntu2.1
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
libfreetype6 - 2.5.2-1ubuntu2.6
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
libfreetype6 - 2.4.8-1ubuntu2.4

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

After a standard system update you need to restart your session to make all the necessary changes.

References