Another X.Org Security Bug Found, Dates Back To 1991

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 7 January 2014 at 06:00 PM EST. 30 Comments
X.ORG
Another X.Org Security Advisory had to be publicly issued today to make known a buffer overflow in an X.Org library that's been present in every X11 release from X11R5 and the code was completed way back in 1991.

Back in October there was a X11 security advisory going back to 1993 and today's noted security issue was for code introduced in May of 1991. This security advisory comes just days after the X Server security was called a disaster with what will amount to at least hundreds of open security issues found by a researcher.

The security was found via running the cppcheck utility as a static analyzer to look at the code. The issue found is a stack buffer overflow in the passing of BDF font files in libXfont. It's an issue present for more than two decades and was easily spotted with static analysis of the code. When a buffer overflow does happen in libXfont, it's possible that the bug could lead to an unprivileged user acquiring root access to the system.

This bug has been found in every X Server release going back to X11R5 and was corrected with the new release of libXfont 1.4.6. More details on this latest security advisory can be found via the xorg-announce list.
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