Vigil@nce: Ghostscript, buffer overflow via PDF
December 2009 by Vigil@nce
An attacker can invite the victim to see a malicious PDF document,
in order to stop Ghostscript, or to execute code.
Severity: 2/4
Consequences: user access/rights, denial of service of client
Provenance: document
Means of attack: no proof of concept, no attack
Ability of attacker: expert (4/4)
Confidence: confirmed by the editor (5/5)
Diffusion of the vulnerable configuration: high (3/3)
Creation date: 21/12/2009
IMPACTED PRODUCTS
– Unix - plateform
DESCRIPTION OF THE VULNERABILITY
The Ghostscript program displays PDF or PostScript documents.
Since version 8.64, Ghostscript uses the errprintf() and
outprintf() functions to log errors. However, these functions call
the vsprintf() function, without checking the size of error
messages, which generates a buffer overflow.
An attacker can therefore invite the victim to see a malicious PDF
document, generating an error, in order to stop Ghostscript, or to
execute code.
CHARACTERISTICS
Identifiers: 540760, 690829, BID-37410, CVE-2009-4270,
VIGILANCE-VUL-9307
http://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Ghostscript-buffer-overflow-via-PDF-9307