Fighting malware and spam

Vulnerabilities closed in OpenOffice, StarOffice

Flaws patched in TIFF parsing code.

Security researchers at iDefense revealed last week that OpenOfficeversion 2.0.4 and earlier versions are vulnerable to maliciously crafted TIFF files, which can be delivered in email attachments, published on websites or shared using peer-to-peer software.

According to iDefense, 'When parsing the TIFF directory entries for certain tags, the parser uses untrusted values from the file to calculate the amount of memory to allocate. By providing specially crafted values, an integer overflow occurs in this calculation. This results in the allocation of a buffer of insufficient size, which in turn leads to a heap overflow.' The full description can be found at the iDefense website here.

The latest release of the OpenOfficesoftware - version 2.3, released 17 September, is not affected by the flaw.

Since the flaw was revealed, Sun, whose StarOffice software is based on OpenOffice, has issued updates to patch the same vulnerability in StarOffice and StarSuite 6, 7 and 8 on Solaris, Linux and Windows. Users are advised to install the update - links to which can be found from the Sun security blog - immediately.

Virus Bulletin magazine carries a two-part article by security researcher Eric Filiol on the security vulnerabilities and viral risks of the OpenOffice suite. Part one was published in the September 2007 issue of the magazine, with part two due to appear in October issue (publication date 1 October 2007). The magazine is available to subscribers only. Subscription information can be found here.

26 September 2007

Tags: flaw, idefense, openoffice, patch, staroffice, vulnerability.