Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in the widely deployed Ghostscript package that allows bad actors to remotely take control of vulnerable systems. There's no current patch available for the multiple flaws discovered.
Ghostscript is a suite of tools used by hundreds of software suites and coding libraries, which allows desktop software and web servers to handle Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages.
Multiple bypass vulnerabilities, disclosed Tuesday, exist in the suite's optional -dSAFER feature, which is ironically supposed to prevent unsafe PostScript operations. By causing Ghostscript (or a program leveraging Ghostscript) to parse a specially-crafted malicious file, a remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the Ghostscript code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:36AM (2 children)
Maybe we need better page description languages…
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:42AM
The problem is not de page description language, but the parser/formatter/etc. Compare it with a image loading library that unsafely reads a malicious image file.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:46AM
Early versions of Postscript and the PDF spec were (imo) very nicely done...if only we could go back...
On my WinXP machine, I can still create PDFs with full Acrobat 6.0, which I believe is before Adobe started to add "features" to their original clean concept? Or, is it necessary to go back even further?