X.Org Hit By New Security Vulnerabilities - Two Date Back To 1988 With X11R2

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

Made public today was CVE-2023-43785 as an out-of-bounds memory access within the libX11 code that has been around since 1996. A second libX11 flaw is stack exhaustion from infinite recursion within the PutSubImage() function of libX11... This vulnerability has been around since X11R2 in February of 1988.

A third libX11 vulnerability made public today is an integer overflow within XCreateImage() that leads to a heap overflow... That too has been around since X11R2 in 1988.

Two libXpm vulnerabilities were also disclosed today related to out-of-bounds reads and both of those date back to 1998.

Due to these issues coming to light, libX11 1.8.7 and libXpm 3.5.17 were released today with the necessary security fixes. More details on these latest X.Org security vulnerabilities via today's X.Org security advisory.