7.5 - USN-173-4

A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)

The following packages are affected:

gnumeric python2.1 python2.2 python2.3

On Ubuntu 4.10, the problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 1.2.13-1ubuntu2.1 (gnumeric), 2.1.3-24.ubuntu0.1 (python2.1), 2.2.3-10.ubuntu0.2 (python2.2), and 2.3.4-2.ubuntu0.2 (python2.3).

On Ubuntu 5.04, the problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 1.4.2-1ubuntu3.1 (gnumeric), 2.2.3dfsg-1ubuntu0.1 (python2.2), and 2.3.5-2ubuntu0.1 (python2.3).

After performing a standard system upgrade you need to restart gnumeric and all python server applications to effect the necessary changes.

Details follow:

USN-173-1 fixed a buffer overflow vulnerability in the PCRE library. However, it was found that the various python packages and gnumeric contain static copies of the library code, so these packages need to be updated as well.

In gnumeric this bug could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user if the user was tricked into opening a specially crafted spreadsheet document.

In python, the impact depends on the particular application that uses python's "re" (regular expression) module. In python server applications that process unchecked arbitrary regular expressions with the "re" module, this could potentially be exploited to remotely execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the server.