Due to a security engineering oversight, the SSL library from KDE,
which Konqueror uses, doesn’t check whether an intermediate
certificate for a connection is signed by the certificate authority as
safe for the purpose, but accepts it when it is signed. This makes it
possible for anyone with a valid VeriSign SSL site certificate to
forge any other VeriSign SSL site certificate, and abuse Konqueror
users.
A local root exploit using artsd has been discovered which exploited
an insecure use of a format string. The exploit wasn’t working on a
Debian system since artsd wasn’t running setuid root. Neither artsd
nor artswrapper need to be setuid root anymore since current computer
systems are fast enough to handle the audio data in time.
These problems have been fixed in version 2.2.2-13.woody.2 for the
current stable distribution (woody). The old stable
distribution (potato) is not affected, since it doesn’t contain KDE
packages. The unstable distribution (sid) is not yet fixed, but new
packages are expected in the future, the fixed version will be version
2.2.2-14 or higher.
We recommend that you upgrade your kdelibs and libarts packages and
restart Konqueror.