KDE Security Advisory: kfax libtiff vulnerabilities Original Release Date: 2004-12-08 URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20041208-2.txt 0. References CAN-2004-0803 CAN-2004-0804 CAN-2004-0886 1. Systems affected: All KDE releases earlier than KDE 3.3.2. 2. Overview: Chris Evans and others discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the libtiff library. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project assigned CAN-2004-0803 to this issue. kfax, a small utility for displaying fax files, contains for historic reasons a private copy of libtiff. Therefore it is vulnerable to these issues as well. kfax and kfax_multipage are invoked by KMail or Konqueror for viewing .g3 files. For the active KDE maintenance branches, which are KDE KDE 3.2.x and KDE 3.3.x, this problem has been solved by removing the private copy of libtiff and using the system installed version instead. As a result, kfax will use the tiff2ps and fax2tiff utilities at runtime as a backend. Due to the complexity of the change, no simple diff is provided. The bug is fixed in KDE 3.3.2 and newer. As a workaround, you can remove the kfax binary and the kfaxpart.la KPart from your system to be on the safe side. 3. Impact: Specially crafted fax files can trigger buffer overflows in libtiff and execute arbitrary code. 4. Solution: Source code updates have been made available which fix these vulnerabilities. Contact your OS vendor / binary package provider for information about how to obtain updated binary packages. 5. Patch: No patches are being made available due to complexity of the change. 6. Time line and credits: 13/10/2004 KDE Security Team alerted by Than Ngo 28/10/2004 private libtiff fork removed from CVS, updated packages finished. 08/12/2004 Public announcement Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: The announcement is currently not publicly released. KDE 3.3.2 should be in portage in the next few days.
Closing access for now.
This advisory is now public. The fix will be to upgrade kdegraphics to the latest version available once I get a fix in place in portage. Will advise as soon as I know the next steps.
Note: The fixed version is currently in portage as kdegraphics-3.3.2. Users wishing to continue using kfax are advised to upgrade to the latest version. Otherwise, I think the best fix here would be to do what the KDE team recomemnds: As a workaround, you can remove the kfax binary and the kfaxpart.la KPart from your system to be on the safe side. That is: rm /usr/kde/3.2/bin/kfax rm /usr/kde/3.3/bin/kfax rm /usr/kde/3.2/libs/kfaxpart.la rm /usr/kde/3.3/libs/kfaxpart.la I will advise once I verify this.
The KDE advisory indicates that this is solved in by removing the private copy of libtiff for KDE 3.2.x and KDE 3.3.x. No diff is supplied but perhaps new tar balls are provided? Another alternative is to quickly mark 3.3.2 stable as a security precaution?
This is public now, opening.
Caleb any estimate on when 3.3.2 can go stable on supported arches (security wise that is x86, ppc, sparc, amd64)?
GLSA 200412-17 Caleb please comment when 3.3.2 goes stable.
3.3.2 is stable on all arches (-sparc). GLSA updated.
sparc stable closing with GLSA 200412-17
*** Bug 143180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
