Software Engineering Institute

The RealNetworks RealPlayer and Helix Player applications allow users to view local and remote audio and video content. These players support multiple media formats including the synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL). A stack-based buffer overflow exists in the way that these players handle the "wallclock-sync" values encoded in the SMIL data. A remote attacker with the ability to supply a specially crafted media file or stream could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on an affected system.

Note that we are aware of publicly-available exploit code for this vulnerability.

A remote unauthenticated attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running a vulnerable application or cause the vulnerable application to crash, resulting in a denial of service.

Apply an update from the vendor

The latest versions of the affected software available at the time of this writing are reported to contain a patch for this issue. Users of RealPlayer are encouraged to take the following steps to update:

• Windows users are encouraged to follow the steps outlined in RealNetworks support document Answer ID 6929
• RealPlayer for Mac OS X users should take the following steps:
  1. Go the RealPlayer menu.
  2. Choose Check for Update.
  3. Select the box next to the "RealPlayer 10 Latest Release" component.
  4. Click Install to download and install the update