14 DAY TRIAL // The PNG Development Group has released new versions of the PNG reference library, libpng, addressing serious security issues that could lead to remote code execution or denial of service conditions.
libpng is a collection of C functions for handling PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images and supporting most of the format's features. The library is incorporated in a wide array of applications that support PNG files, including browsers like Mozilla Firefox, image editors like GIMP, image viewers, image convertors and even games or office-type applications.
According to a security warning posted on the official libpng website, versions of the library older than 1.4.3 and 1.2.44 are vulnerable to a memory overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability is identified in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database as CVE-2010-1205.
"Progressive applications such as web browsers (or the rpng2 demo app included in libpng) could receive an extra row of image data beyond the height reported in the header, potentially leading to an out-of-bounds write to memory (depending on how the application is written) and the possibility of execution of an attacker's code with the privileges of the libpng user," the advisory reads. As far as remote attacks go, this flaw is exploitable by inserting such a malformed PNG image into a website.
Additionally, both actively maintained libpng branches, 1.4.x and 1.2.x, suffered from a memory-leak bug that could lead to unexpected crashes, when viewing images with malformed sCAL chunks. Application developers using the library are advised to upgrade the package to 1.4.3 or 1.2.44, depending on the version they use.
This update comes after earlier this month, several high severity buffer overflow vulnerabilities were addressed in libtiff, another widely-spread reference library for handling TIFF (Tag Image File Format) images. Version 3.9.4 of libtiff, which resolves these issues, was released on June 15.
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