USN-7336-1: GNU Chess vulnerability

6 March 2025

gnuchess could be made to crash or run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.

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Releases

Packages

  • gnuchess - Plays a game of chess, either against the user or against itself

Details

Michael Vaughan discovered an overflow vulnerability in GNU Chess that
occurs when reading a specially crafted Portable Game Notation (PGN)
file. An attacker could possibly use this issue to cause GNU Chess to
crash, resulting in a denial of service, or the execution of arbitrary
code.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 24.10
Ubuntu 24.04
Ubuntu 22.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading