USN-607-1: Emacs vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 8.04
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Ubuntu 7.04
• Ubuntu 6.06

Packages

• emacs21 -
• emacs22 -

Details

It was discovered that Emacs did not account for precision when formatting
integers. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted file, an
attacker could cause a denial of service or possibly other unspecified
actions. This issue does not affect Ubuntu 8.04. (CVE-2007-6109)

Steve Grubb discovered that the vcdiff script as included in Emacs created
temporary files in an insecure way when used with SCCS. Local users could
exploit a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges
of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2008-1694)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 8.04

• emacs22 - 22.1-0ubuntu10.1
• emacs22-bin-common - 22.1-0ubuntu10.1

Ubuntu 7.10

• emacs22 - 22.1-0ubuntu5.2
• emacs22-bin-common - 22.1-0ubuntu5.2

Ubuntu 7.04

• emacs21 - 21.4a+1-2ubuntu1.2
• emacs21-bin-common - 21.4a+1-2ubuntu1.2

Ubuntu 6.06

• emacs21 - 21.4a-3ubuntu2.2
• emacs21-bin-common - 21.4a-3ubuntu2.2

After a standard system upgrade you need to restart Emacs to effect
the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2008-1694
• CVE-2007-6109