A vulnerability and a security issue have been reported in GNU M4, which can be exploited by malicious people to manipulate certain data or to potentially compromise a user's system.

1) A format string error exists within the "produce_frozen_state()" function in src/freeze.c. This can be exploited via a specially crafted filename passed as a parameter to "m4 -F".

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires that the user is tricked into processing a filename containing malicious format specifiers.

2) An error within the implementation of the "maketemp" and "mkstemp" macros can potentially be exploited to trigger the processing of improper files via special characters contained in the output string.

The vulnerability and the security issue are reported in version 1.4.10. Prior versions may also be affected.

Solution
Update to version 1.4.11.

Provided and/or discovered by
Reported by the vendor.

Original Advisory
http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=m4.git;a=commit;h=035998112737e52cb229e342913ef404e5a51040
http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=m4.git;a=commit;h=5345bb49077bfda9fabd048e563f9e7077fe335d

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