Trilight Zone

[tricore]

OpenOffice, the free office suite that offers an alternative to the dominant Microsoft Office software, is vulnerable to a WMF (Windows Metafile) code-execution flaw.
The bug, which is rated "highly critical" by security alerts aggregator Secunia, can be exploited by specially rigged WMF file.

"The vulnerability is caused due to integer overflows within the processor for [WMF] files. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted file," Secunia warned.


In a successful attack scenario, a rigged WMF file could cause OpenOffice to execute arbitrary code when the file was opened by the target.

Secunia recommends that OpenOffice users upgrade to Version 2.1, which has been patched.

Red Hat has also shipped updates to correct the issue.

This is the second major flaw to affect OpenOffice, which supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange. In April 2005, the open-source group was forced to rush out a fix for a buffer overflow that put users at risk of code execution attacks.