USN-2726-1: Expat vulnerability

31 August 2015

Expat could be made to crash or run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.

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Releases

Packages

  • expat - XML parsing C library

Details

It was discovered that Expat incorrectly handled malformed XML data. If a
user or application linked against Expat were tricked into opening a
crafted XML file, an attacker could cause a denial of service, or possibly
execute arbitrary code.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 15.04
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

After a standard system upgrade you need to restart any applications linked
against Expat to effect the necessary changes.

References

Related notices

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Further reading