Some vulnerabilities have been reported in teTeX, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to disclose and manipulate sensitive information and by malicious people to potentially compromise a vulnerable system.

1) A boundary error in dvips can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow when a user is tricked into opening a specially crafted DVI file containing an overly long hypertext reference.

Successful exploitation requires that dvips is invoked with the "-z" option.

2) Some boundary errors in dviljk can be exploited to cause buffer overflows when a user is enticed to print a specially crafted DVI file.

Successful exploitation of vulnerabilities #1 and #2 may allow execution of arbitrary code.

3) An error due to dvips using the insecure "tmpnam()" function when converting DVI files can potentially be exploited to disclose and modify sensitive information.

Solution
Do not process DVI files from untrusted sources. Grant only trusted users access to affected systems.

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Bastien Roucaries, reported via a Debian bug report.
2, 3) Joachim Schrod

Original Advisory
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=447081
http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=135423

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