Texinfo: Buffer overflow

Background

Texinfo is the official documentation system of the GNU project.

Description

Miloslav Trmac from Red Hat discovered a buffer overflow in the “readline()” function of texindex.c. The “readline()” function is called by the texi2dvi and texindex commands.

Impact

By enticing a user to open a specially crafted Texinfo file, an attacker could execute arbitrary code with the rights of the user running Texinfo.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Texinfo users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-apps/texinfo-4.8-r5"