search menu icon-carat-right cmu-wordmark
Carnegie Mellon University

Software Engineering Institute

CERT Coordination Center

Ghostscript Heap Corruption in TrueType bytecode interpreter

Vulnerability Note VU#644319

Original Release Date: 2010-08-24 | Last Revised: 2010-12-06

Overview

The TrueType bytecode interpreter which is a part of Ghostscript is prone to heap corruption.

Description

Ghostscript includes a TrueType bytecode interpreter which is prone to an off by one bug which causes heap corruption. Further details can be found in the Ghostscript Bug #691044, Ghostscript r10602 commit statement and Toucan System's TSSA-2010-01 advisory.

Impact

An attacker may use a specially crafted document with a malformed TrueType font to cause a denial of service condition or execute arbitrary code.

Solution

Upgrade to Ghostscript 8.71 or newer.

Vendor Information

644319
 
Expand all

Artifex Software, Inc. Affected

Notified:  August 03, 2010 Updated: August 24, 2010

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

We have not received a statement from the vendor.

Vendor Information

We are not aware of further vendor information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

The reporter initially contacted the vendor 10-26-2009.

Vendor fixed the vulnerability on 01-11-2010 without mentioning security implications.
The reporter contacted CERT 07-20-2010.
CERT contacted the vendor 08-03-2010.

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.


CVSS Metrics

Group Score Vector
Base
Temporal
Environmental

References

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jonathan Brossard for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Jared Allar.

Other Information

CVE IDs: CVE-2009-3743
Severity Metric: 0.45
Date Public: 2010-08-24
Date First Published: 2010-08-24
Date Last Updated: 2010-12-06 15:32 UTC
Document Revision: 35

Sponsored by CISA.

Download PGP Key

Read CERT/CC Blog

Learn about Vulnerability Analysis