Security Information / 2011 / Security Information -- DSA-2198-1 tex-common

Debian Security Advisory

DSA-2198-1 tex-common -- insufficient input sanitization

Date Reported:

22 Mar 2011

Affected Packages:

tex-common

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2011-1400.

More information:

Mathias Svensson discovered that tex-common, a package shipping a number of scripts and configuration files necessary for TeX, contains insecure settings for the shell_escape_commands directive. Depending on the scenario, this may result in arbitrary code execution when a victim is tricked into processing a malicious tex-file or this is done in an automated fashion.

The oldstable distribution (lenny) is not affected by this problem due to shell_escape being disabled.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 2.08.1.

For the testing (wheezy) and unstable (sid) distributions, this problem will be fixed soon.

We recommend that you upgrade your tex-common packages.