Speex: User-assisted execution of arbitrary code

Background

Speex is an audio compression format designed for speech that is free of patent restrictions.

Description

oCERT reported that the Speex library does not properly validate the “mode” value it derives from Speex streams, allowing for array indexing vulnerabilities inside multiple player applications. Within Gentoo, xine-lib, VLC, gst-plugins-speex from the GStreamer Good Plug-ins, vorbis-tools, libfishsound, Sweep, SDL_sound, and speexdec were found to be vulnerable.

Impact

A remote attacker could entice a user to open a specially crafted Speex file or network stream with an application listed above. This might lead to the execution of arbitrary code with privileges of the user playing the file.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Speex users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=media-libs/speex-1.2_beta3_p2"