Gnumeric: Heap overflow in the included PCRE library

Background

The Gnumeric spreadsheet is a versatile application developed as part of the GNOME Office project. libpcre is a library providing functions for Perl-compatible regular expressions.

Description

Gnumeric contains a private copy of libpcre which is subject to an integer overflow leading to a heap overflow (see GLSA 200508-17).

Impact

An attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted spreadsheet, which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running Gnumeric.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Gnumeric users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-office/gnumeric-1.4.3-r2"