USN-52-1: vim vulnerability

23 December 2004

vim vulnerability

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Releases

Details

Ciaran McCreesh found several vulnerabilities related to the use of
options in Vim modeline commands, such as ‘termcap’, ‘printdevice’,
‘titleold’, ‘filetype’, ‘syntax’, ‘backupext’, ‘keymap’, ‘patchmode’,
and ‘langmenu’.

If an attacker tricked an user to open a file with a specially crafted
modeline, he could exploit this to execute arbitrary commands with the
user’s privileges.

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 4.10
  • vim-tcl -
  • vim-gnome -
  • vim-lesstif -
  • vim-gtk -
  • kvim -
  • vim -
  • vim-python -
  • vim-perl -

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

References

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