Vulnerability Spotlight: LibTIFF Issues Lead To Code Execution

These Vulnerabilities were discovered by Tyler Bohan of Cisco Talos.

Talos is releasing multiple vulnerabilities (TALOS-2016-0187, TALOS-2016-0190 & TALOS-2016-0205) in the LibTIFF library . One vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0187) is an exploitable heap based buffer overflow that impacts the LibTIFF TIFF2PDF conversion tool. Another vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0190) impacts the parsing and handling of TIFF images ultimately leading to remote code execution. The final vulnerability (TALOS-2016-0205) is an exploitable heap based buffer overflow in the handling of compressed TIFF images in LibTIFF’s PixarLogDecode API. An attacker who can trick a user into processing a malformed TIFF document can use one of these vulnerabilities to achieve remote code execution on the targeted system.

The Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)  was developed in the mid-1980’s as a common file format able to store image data in a lossless format for the burgeoning image manipulation industry. Since then TIFF files have been widely adopted within the graphic arts industry, and also by electronic fax systems.

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