Ubuntu 6.06 LTS / 8.04 LTS / 8.10 / 9.04 / 9.10 : gzip vulnerabilities (USN-889-1)
Medium Nessus Plugin ID 44107
Synopsis
The remote Ubuntu host is missing a security-related patch.
Description
It was discovered that gzip incorrectly handled certain malformed compressed files. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a specially crafted gzip file, an attacker could cause gzip to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-2624)
Aki Helin discovered that gzip incorrectly handled certain malformed files compressed with the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a specially crafted gzip file, an attacker could cause gzip to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program.
(CVE-2010-0001).
Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
Solution
Update the affected gzip package.