Fedora patches old OpenOffice flaw

Fedora has fixed a 'highly critical' flaw in the OpenOffice suite of products more than two weeks after it was first discovered.

The vulnerability was announced on the Secunia security website on 18 September and Red Hat provided a fix on the same day for its Enterprise Linux products.

However, an update to fix the problem in the free Fedora Linux has only just been released, despite Red Hat being its main sponsor.

The OpenOffice vulnerability is caused by integer overflows when processing certain tags within Tiff images.

The problem could be exploited to cause heap-based buffer overflows, possibly by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted document.

Successful exploitation could allow the execution of arbitrary code and compromise a user's system.

OpenOffice is a free office productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, formula editor and drawing program.

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