Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in gaim, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

1) Two boundary errors within the parsing functions for the MSNSLP protocol can be exploited to cause buffer overflows and potentially execute arbitrary code.

2) Missing validation of filenames within the handling of drag-and-drop smiley themes can be exploited via a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary commands on a user's system by tricking the user into dragging a malicious file into the smiley theme selector.

3) An integer overflow error within the handling of Groupware messages can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted message from a malicious groupware server.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

4) A boundary error within the decoding of URLs can potentially be exploited to cause a buffer overflow when an overly long URL (more than 2048 bytes) is received.

5) A boundary error within the processing of RTF messages can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow via a specially crafted RTF message.

6) An error within the handling of overly large values in "Content-Length:" headers can be exploited by malicious web servers to crash Gaim.

7) A boundary error within the local hostname resolution can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow via a DNS reply containing an overly long hostname.

Successful exploitation requires that the local hostname is not in "/etc/hosts" and a DNS query is sent to a DNS server when signing on to zephyr.

The vulnerabilities have been reported in version 0.81. Prior versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 0.82 or apply patch.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Sebastian Krahmer, SuSE Security Team.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/security.php

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers