Secunia

CUPS has been found vulnerable to multiple issues.

Some integer overflows can be exploited to overwite addresses of other functions with addresses of arbitrary code, the code is executed as user 'lp'.

Users who have gained privileges of user 'lp' can create /etc/cups/certs/<pid>, by doing so it is possible to create and overwrite files with root privileges.

It is possible to add printers via specially crafted UDP packets, this could potentially be exploited by local user to retrieve the root certificate, using this root certificate it is possible to add another printer which can execute commands with root privileges.

CUPS suffers a vulnerability which is very similar to the Apache chunk encoding vulnerability. The problem is that negative content lengths are allowed.

Calls to strncat() are made insecurely, this allows malicious people to create print jobs which may overflow buffers, which can be abused to execute arbitrary code.

Zero width gif images are handled insecurely, this makes it possible to cause a buffer overflow which can be exploited to run arbitrary code.

CUPS does not check return values of file and socket operations, this leads to file descriptor leaks and allows a local Denial of Service.

Solution
Secunia recommend that printing services only are accessible by local and trusted users, they should never by accessible from the Internet.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
Discovered by zen-parse
Published by iDEFENSE

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area