KSirc: Denial of Service vulnerability

Background

KSirc is the default KDE IRC client.

Description

KSirc fails to check the size of an incoming PRIVMSG string sent from an IRC server during the connection process.

Impact

A malicious IRC server could send a long PRIVMSG string to the KSirc client causing an assertion failure and the dereferencing of a null pointer, resulting in a crash.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All KSirc users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=kde-base/ksirc-3.5.5-r1"