Vulnerabilities in Image Magick Closed

Sep 24, 2007

Four bugs have been discovered in the free Image Magick image manipulation Software and classified as highly critical by several security research services. A new version closes the security holes.

Version 6.3.5-9 of Image Magick, which was released recently, removes four vulnerabilities. Applications that used libraries provided by the software were also affected. One vulnerability allowed denial of service attacks that resulted in increased CPU activity and considerably slowed down the compromised system.

Potential attackers were able to exploit an error in the "AllocateImageColormap()", "ReadDCMImage()", "ReadDIBImage()", and "ReadXBMImage()" functions to crash Image Magick and other applications by triggering an integer overflow. An "off-by-one"error in the "ReadBlobString()" function and various errors in the "ReadDCMImage()" and "ReadXCFImage()" functions gave successful attackers the ability to run arbitrary code.

The security holes not only affect Linux systems, but any platform for which Image Magick is available. The developers advise users to upgrade to the new version as soon as possible. The sources for version 6.3.5-9 are available from various mirrors. Prebuilt packages are available here for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows.

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