KDE Security Advisory: kfax libtiff vulnerabilities

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KDE Security Advisory: kfax libtiff vulnerabilities
Original Release Date: 2004-12-09
URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20041209-2.txt

0. References

    CAN-2004-0803
    CAN-2004-0804
    CAN-2004-0886
   

1. Systems affected:

    All KDE releases earlier than KDE 3.3.2.
   

2. Overview:

    Chris Evans and others discovered multiple vulnerabilities
    in the libtiff library. The Common Vulnerabilities and
    Exposures project assigned CAN-2004-0803 to this issue.
   
    kfax, a small utility for displaying fax files, contains
    for historic reasons a private copy of libtiff. Therefore
    it is vulnerable to these issues as well.
   
    kfax and the kfax KPart are invoked by KMail or Konqueror
    for viewing .g3 files.
   
    For the active KDE maintenance branches, which are
    KDE 3.2.x and KDE 3.3.x, this problem has been solved by
    removing the private copy of libtiff. In KDE 3.2.x, kfax
    will use the tiff2ps and fax2tiff utilities at runtime as
    backend. In KDE 3.3.x the code requiring libtiff or any other
    runtime dependencies has been replaced by a native solution
    that is unaffected by the mentioned vulnerabilities.
   
    Due to the complexity of the change, no simple diff is
    provided. The problems have been addressed in the KDE 3.3.2
    release.
   
    As a workaround, you can remove the kfax binary and the
    kfaxpart.la KPart from your system to be on the safe
    side.
   

3. Impact:

    Specially crafted fax files can trigger buffer overflows
    in libtiff and execute arbitrary code. 
   

4. Solution:

    Source code updates have been made available which fix these
    vulnerabilities. Contact your OS vendor / binary package provider
    for information about how to obtain updated binary packages.
   

5. Patch:

    No patches are being made available due to complexity of the change.
   

6. Time line and credits:

    13/10/2004 KDE Security Team alerted by Than Ngo
    28/10/2004 private libtiff fork removed from CVS, updated
               packages finished.
    XX/11/2004 Regression fixing, several refinements.
    09/12/2004 Public announcement
   

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