Ubuntu Security Notice USN-607-1
6th May, 2008
emacs21, emacs22 vulnerabilities
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
- Ubuntu 7.10
- Ubuntu 7.04
- Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Software description
- emacs21
- emacs22
Details
It was discovered that Emacs did not account for precision when formatting
integers. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted file, an
attacker could cause a denial of service or possibly other unspecified
actions. This issue does not affect Ubuntu 8.04. (CVE-2007-6109)
Steve Grubb discovered that the vcdiff script as included in Emacs created
temporary files in an insecure way when used with SCCS. Local users could
exploit a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges
of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2008-1694)
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS:
- emacs22 22.1-0ubuntu10.1
- emacs22-bin-common 22.1-0ubuntu10.1
- Ubuntu 7.10:
- emacs22 22.1-0ubuntu5.2
- emacs22-bin-common 22.1-0ubuntu5.2
- Ubuntu 7.04:
- emacs21 21.4a+1-2ubuntu1.2
- emacs21-bin-common 21.4a+1-2ubuntu1.2
- Ubuntu 6.06 LTS:
- emacs21 21.4a-3ubuntu2.2
- emacs21-bin-common 21.4a-3ubuntu2.2
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
After a standard system upgrade you need to restart Emacs to effect
the necessary changes.