freetype vulnerability

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2011-0226  

FreeType could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted font file.

It was discovered that FreeType did not correctly handle certain malformed Type 1 font files. If a user were tricked into using a specially crafted font file, a remote attacker could cause FreeType to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with user privileges.

25 July 2011

freetype vulnerability

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

  • Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 10.10

Summary

FreeType could be made to run programs as your login 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 Type 1 font files. If a user were tricked into using a specially crafted font file, a remote attacker could cause FreeType to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with user privileges.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 11.04
libfreetype6 - 2.4.4-1ubuntu2.1
Ubuntu 10.10
libfreetype6 - 2.4.2-2ubuntu0.2

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