Festival: Arbitrary code execution

Background

Festival is a Text to Speech Engine from The Centre for Speech Technology Research.

Description

A vulnerability in Festival Server has an incorrect path in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which allows local users to place a Trojan horse shared library in the current working directory.

Impact

A local attacker can execute arbitrary a Trojan horse shared library, potentially resulting in arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Festival users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-accessibility/festival-2.1"