bugtraq - Re: Ghostscript 8.64 executes random code at startup

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Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 12:32:51 +1000
From: paul.szabo@...ney.edu.au
To: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com, ne01026@...gny.2a.pl
Subject: Re: Ghostscript 8.64 executes random code at startup

Dear Christopher,

> Ghostscript_8.64 on openSuSE_11.2 executes all files matching
> ./Encoding/* on startup.  This search is relative to the current
> directory so it is easy to poison Ghostscript and cause it to execute
> arbitrary PostScript code without user action or knowledge.
>
> Details: <URL:https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=608071>

Interesting! So if someone creates /tmp/Encoding then it is dangerous
to do
  cd /tmp; gs any.ps

I now used:
  strace -omylog gs
  grep '"\./' mylog | sort -u
and that shows that gs tries many files in currrent directory,
"protection" against just ./Encoding is not enough.

Cheers,

Paul Szabo   psz@...hs.usyd.edu.au   http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/
School of Mathematics and Statistics   University of Sydney    Australia