When rendering glyphs, the cairo graphics rendering library did not check the maximum length of character strings. A request to display an excessively long string with cairo caused a program crash due to an X library error.
Mike Davis discovered that this could be turned into a Denial of Service attack in Evolution. An email with an attachment with very long lines caused Evolution to crash repeatedly until that email was manually removed from the mail folder.
23 March 2006
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
When rendering glyphs, the cairo graphics rendering library did not check the maximum length of character strings. A request to display an excessively long string with cairo caused a program crash due to an X library error.
Mike Davis discovered that this could be turned into a Denial of Service attack in Evolution. An email with an attachment with very long lines caused Evolution to crash repeatedly until that email was manually removed from the mail folder.
This only affects Ubuntu 5.10. Previous Ubuntu releases did not use libcairo for text rendering.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
Vulmon