cairo/Evolution library vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10

Details

When rendering glyphs, the cairo graphics rendering library did not
check the maximum length of character strings. A request to display
an excessively long string with cairo caused a program crash due to an
X library error.

Mike Davis discovered that this could be turned into a Denial of
Service attack in Evolution. An email with an attachment with very
long lines caused Evolution to crash repeatedly until that email was
manually removed from the mail folder.

This only affects Ubuntu 5.10. Previous Ubuntu releases did not use
libcairo for text rendering.