23-Year-Old X11 Server Security Vulnerability Discovered

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday January 8, 2014 @03:11AM from the stack-smashing-for-fun-and-profit dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The recent report of X11/X.Org security in bad shape rings more truth today. The X.Org Foundation announced today that they've found a X11 security issue that dates back to 1991. The issue is a possible stack buffer overflow that could lead to privilege escalation to root and affects all versions of the X Server back to X11R5. After the vulnerability being in the code-base for 23 years, it was finally uncovered via the automated cppcheck static analysis utility." There's a scanf used when loading BDF fonts that can overflow using a carefully crafted font. Watch out for those obsolete early-90s bitmap fonts.

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Re:Many eyes... by smash · 2014-01-08 03:41 · Score: 0, Flamebait

LINUX PLUS X11 IS MORE SECURE THAN WINDOWS WILL EVER BE AND I WONT HEAR ANYUONE SAY OTHERWISE!!1
... Makes for falling behind everyone else.
Now, i need to fill the text box with lowercase letters to get rid of the caps warning.

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I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Re:Many eyes... by RoverDaddy · 2014-01-08 03:54 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Sorry, posting to remove erroneous moderation. Me and my clumsy fingers. Consider yourself getting +1 Funny.

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