Users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible

Jul 24, 2014 13:55 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has announced that a few Libtasn1 vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems have been identified and corrected.

The company has just released a new update for Libtasn1, through which a few problems have been corrected. The issues can be fixed by updating the system.

“It was discovered that Libtasn1 incorrectly handled certain ASN.1 data structures. An attacker could exploit this with specially crafted ASN.1 data and cause applications using Libtasn1 to crash, resulting in a denial of service,” reads the security notice.

Also, “It was discovered that Libtasn1 incorrectly handled negative bit lengths. An attacker could exploit this with specially crafted ASN.1 data and cause applications using Libtasn1 to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.”

These are just a couple of the vulnerabilities identified by the developers, and for a more detailed description of the problems you can see Canonical's security notification. Users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.

The flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest php5 packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes, and users won't have to restart the PC or laptop in order to apply the patch.