CVE-2010-2642: Buffer Overflow

A heap based buffer overflow was found in the parser for AFM font files, which are used for rendering DVI files in GNOME evince document viewer. Due to insufficient bounds checks when writing data to a memory buffer allocated on a heap, it may be possible to cause an arbitrary memory overwrite, leading to code execution.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2010-2642 to this issue.

The vulnerability is present in the code that handles loading of fonts used by DVI files.To exploit you need two files, a DVI file and the malicious font. The vulnerability is triggered not only by opening the document in evince, but also by browsing to a folder which contains the malicious files, where evince thumbnailer will load the malicious file to generate a thumbnail for it.

Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank the Evince development team for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Jon Larimer of IBM X-Force as the original reporter.