vim vulnerability

29 November 2016

vim 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

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

Software Description

• vim - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor

Details

Florian Larysch discovered that the Vim text editor did not properly validate values for the ‘filetype’, ‘syntax’, and ‘keymap’ options. An attacker could trick a user into opening a file with specially crafted modelines and possibly execute arbitrary code with the user’s privileges.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 16.10

vim - 2:7.4.1829-1ubuntu2.1

vim-common - 2:7.4.1829-1ubuntu2.1

vim-gui-common - 2:7.4.1829-1ubuntu2.1

vim-runtime - 2:7.4.1829-1ubuntu2.1

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

vim - 2:7.4.1689-3ubuntu1.2

vim-common - 2:7.4.1689-3ubuntu1.2

vim-gui-common - 2:7.4.1689-3ubuntu1.2

vim-runtime - 2:7.4.1689-3ubuntu1.2

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

vim - 2:7.4.052-1ubuntu3.1

vim-common - 2:7.4.052-1ubuntu3.1

vim-gui-common - 2:7.4.052-1ubuntu3.1

vim-runtime - 2:7.4.052-1ubuntu3.1

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

vim - 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.2

vim-common - 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.2

vim-gui-common - 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.2

vim-runtime - 2:7.3.429-2ubuntu2.2

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

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

References

• CVE-2016-1248