PDF import support has been disabled in KWord due to many security vulnerabilities that could be used by an attacker to run programs as your login.
Will Dormann, Alin Rad Pop, Braden Thomas, and Drew Yao discovered that the Xpdf used in KOffice contained multiple security issues in its JBIG2 decoder. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a crafted PDF file, an attacker could cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-0146, CVE-2009-0147, CVE-2009-0166, CVE-2009-0799, CVE-2009-0800, CVE-2009-1179, CVE-2009-1180, CVE-2009-1181)
17 August 2010
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
PDF import support has been disabled in KWord due to many security vulnerabilities that could be used by an attacker to run programs as your login.
Will Dormann, Alin Rad Pop, Braden Thomas, and Drew Yao discovered that the Xpdf used in KOffice contained multiple security issues in its JBIG2 decoder. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a crafted PDF file, an attacker could cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-0146, CVE-2009-0147, CVE-2009-0166, CVE-2009-0799, CVE-2009-0800, CVE-2009-1179, CVE-2009-1180, CVE-2009-1181)
It was discovered that the Xpdf used in KOffice contained multiple security issues when parsing malformed PDF documents. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a crafted PDF file, an attacker could cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-3606, CVE-2009-3608, CVE-2009-3609)
KOffice in Ubuntu 9.04 uses a very old version of Xpdf to import PDFs into KWord. Upstream KDE no longer supports PDF import in KOffice and as a result it was dropped in Ubuntu 9.10. While an attempt was made to fix the above issues, the maintenance burden for supporting this very old version of Xpdf outweighed its utility, and PDF import is now also disabled in Ubuntu 9.04.
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.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.
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