A vulnerability was discovered in slocate, a program to index and search for files, whereby a specially crafted database could overflow a heap-based buffer. This vulnerability could be exploited by a local attacker to gain the privileges of the "slocate" group, which can access the global database containing a list of pathnames of all files on the system, including those which should only be visible to privileged users.
This problem, and a category of potential similar problems, have been fixed by modifying slocate to drop privileges before reading a user-supplied database.
For the current stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 2.6-1.3.2.
For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem will be fixed soon. Refer to Debian bug #226103 for status information.
We recommend that you update your slocate package.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.