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Unpatched Ghostscript Flaws Allow Remote Takeover of Systems

posted by mrpg on Thursday August 23 2018, @09:39AM   
from the smoke-gets-in-your-computer dept.

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Threatpost:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:openssl all over again (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:59PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:59PM (#725401)

  Not only is PostScript itself Turing complete, but it and PDF allow you to embed and run other Turing complete languages in a document. The attack surface of all those language interpreters is gigantic. And that doesn't even get into the parsing of raster graphics, vector graphics, audio files, interactive elements, embedded elements, attached files, markup languages, and some I forgot next to the kitchen sink. Plus, you then have to deal with how the subsystems interact with each other.

  Parent

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