Debian Security Advisory

DSA-340-1 x-face-el -- insecure temporary file

Date Reported:

06 Jul 2003

Affected Packages:

x-face-el

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

No other external database security references currently available.

More information:

NOTE: due to a combination of administrative problems, this advisory was erroneously released with the identifier "DSA-338-1". DSA-338-1 correctly refers to an earlier advisory regarding proftpd.

x-face-el, a decoder for images included inline in X-Face email headers, does not take appropriate security precautions when creating temporary files. This bug could potentially be exploited to overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the user running Emacs and x-face-el, potentially with contents supplied by the attacker.

For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 1.3.6.19-1woody1.

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in version 1.3.6.23-1.

We recommend that you update your x-face-el package.

Fixed in:

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody)

Source:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/x/x-face-el/x-face-el_1.3.6.19-1woody1.dsc

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/x/x-face-el/x-face-el_1.3.6.19-1woody1.diff.gz

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/x/x-face-el/x-face-el_1.3.6.19.orig.tar.gz

Architecture-independent component:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/x/x-face-el/x-face-el_1.3.6.19-1woody1_all.deb

MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.