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HIGH

ghostscript: /invalidaccess bypass after failed restore (699654)

Published Sep 5, 2018

Description

An issue was discovered in Artifex Ghostscript before 9.24. Incorrect "restoration of privilege" checking during handling of /invalidaccess exceptions could be used by attackers able to supply crafted PostScript to execute code using the "pipe" instruction.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

This issue did affect the versions of ghostscript as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, and 7. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now in Extended Life Phase of the support and maintenance life cycle. This issue is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/.

Red Hat mitigation

* ImageMagick relies on ghostscript when processing certain files formats. Thus, ImageMagick can be used as an attack vector. In order to prevent ImageMagick from processing those files on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7, you can disable the use of ghostscript and the processing of PS, EPS, PDF, and XPS file formats in ImageMagick's security policy by opening /etc/ImageMagick/policy.xml and adding the following lines to the "<policymap>" section of the file: ``` <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PS" /> <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="EPS" /> <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" /> <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="XPS" /> <policy domain="delegate" rights="none" pattern="gs" /> ``` * Additionally, this issue can be triggered when processing files in order to generate thumbnails, for example when browsing a folder containing a malicious PostScript file in Nautilus. To prevent this, remove or rename the "/usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer" executable. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.7.6 and above, the thumbnailing is done in a sandbox. * It is possible to run PDF/PS viewers, such as evince and okular, in a SELinux sandbox using the `sandbox` command from the policycoreutils-sandbox package : $ sandbox -X evince <untrusted-file.pdf> The sandbox will prevent an attacker to make modifications on the file system.

Metrics

Weaknesses (0)

No CWE recorded.

References (19)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published Sep 5, 2018
Updated Aug 5, 2024
Reserved Sep 4, 2018
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Important
Public date Aug 21, 2018