[USN-891-1] lintian vulnerabilities

By | 2010/01/28

The following security announcement applies to lintian. If you have lintian installed, please see below for details on the vulnerability and instructions on patching your system:

It was discovered that lintian did not correctly validate certain
filenames when processing input.  If a user or an automated system
were tricked into running lintian on a specially crafted set of files,
a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code with user privileges.

The above security vulnerabilities apply to the following Ubuntu releases:

  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.10
  • Ubuntu 9.04
  • Ubuntu 9.10

If you are have this utility installed on your Ubuntu system you’ll need to apply the security update to be protected. Please follow the steps below to ensure your system is properly patched:

Apply Updates

To apply the updates run the following command(s) within your Terminal:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.