Chris Evans discovered several stack overflows in the versions of libXpm shipped by X.Org, XFree86, and LessTif. These overflows were fixed in the Warty development tree before its release. Mathieu Herrb of OpenBSD subsequently discovered that the original patch was insufficient to address these overflows, and thus the version of libxpm4 shipped with Warty is still vulnerable to the original overflows.
These overflows do not allow privilege escalation through the X server; the overflows are in a client-side library, allowing arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user viewing a malicious pixmap.
18 November 2004
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Chris Evans discovered several stack overflows in the versions of libXpm shipped by X.Org, XFree86, and LessTif. These overflows were fixed in the Warty development tree before its release. Mathieu Herrb of OpenBSD subsequently discovered that the original patch was insufficient to address these overflows, and thus the version of libxpm4 shipped with Warty is still vulnerable to the original overflows.
These overflows do not allow privilege escalation through the X server; the overflows are in a client-side library, allowing arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user viewing a malicious pixmap.
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