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LibreOffice Releases Software Update to Patch 3 New Vulnerabilities
The team behind LibreOffice has released security updates to fix three security flaws in the productivity software, one of which could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as CVE-2022-26305, the issue has been described as a case of improper certificate validation when checking whether a macro is signed by a trusted author, leading to the execution of
The team behind LibreOffice has released security updates to fix three security flaws in the productivity software, one of which could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected systems.
Tracked as CVE-2022-26305, the issue has been described as a case of improper certificate validation when checking whether a macro is signed by a trusted author, leading to the execution of rogue code packaged within the macros.
“An adversary could therefore create an arbitrary certificate with a serial number and an issuer string identical to a trusted certificate which LibreOffice would present as belonging to the trusted author, potentially leading to the user to execute arbitrary code contained in macros improperly trusted,” LibreOffice said in an advisory.
Also resolved is the use of a static initialization vector (IV) during encryption (CVE-2022-26306) that could have weakened the security should a bad actor have access to the user’s configuration information.
Lastly, the updates also resolve CVE-2022-26307, wherein the master key was poorly encoded, rendering the stored passwords susceptible to a brute-force attack if an adversary is in possession of the user configuration.
The three vulnerabilities, which were reported by OpenSource Security GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Office for Information Security, have been addressed in LibreOffice versions 7.2.7, 7.3.2, and 7.3.3.
The patches come five months after the Document Foundation fixed another improper certificate validation bug (CVE-2021-25636) in February 2022. Last October, three spoofing flaws were patched that could be abused to alter documents to make them appear as if they are digitally signed by a trusted source.
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Red Hat Security Advisory 2023-0089-01 - LibreOffice is an open source, community-developed office productivity suite. It includes key desktop applications, such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation manager, a formula editor, and a drawing program. LibreOffice replaces OpenOffice and provides a similar but enhanced and extended office suite. Issues addressed include a script execution vulnerability.
Ubuntu Security Notice 5694-1 - It was discovered that LibreOffice incorrectly handled links using the Office URI Schemes. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted document, a remote attacker could use this issue to execute arbitrary scripts. Thomas Florian discovered that LibreOffice incorrectly handled crashes when an encrypted document is open. If the document is recovered upon restarting LibreOffice, subsequent saves of the document were unencrypted. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Ubuntu Security Notice 5661-1 - It was discovered that LibreOffice incorrectly validated macro signatures. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted document, a remote attacker could possibly use this issue to execute arbitrary macros. It was discovered that Libreoffice incorrectly handled encrypting the master key provided by the user for storing passwords for web connections. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to obtain access to passwords stored in the user's configuration data.
LibreOffice supports the storage of passwords for web connections in the user’s configuration database. The stored passwords are encrypted with a single master key provided by the user. A flaw in LibreOffice existed where the required initialization vector for encryption was always the same which weakens the security of the encryption making them vulnerable if an attacker has access to the user's configuration data. This issue affects: The Document Foundation LibreOffice 7.2 versions prior to 7.2.7; 7.3 versions prior to 7.3.1.
LibreOffice supports the storage of passwords for web connections in the user’s configuration database. The stored passwords are encrypted with a single master key provided by the user. A flaw in LibreOffice existed where master key was poorly encoded resulting in weakening its entropy from 128 to 43 bits making the stored passwords vulerable to a brute force attack if an attacker has access to the users stored config. This issue affects: The Document Foundation LibreOffice 7.2 versions prior to 7.2.7; 7.3 versions prior to 7.3.3.
An Improper Certificate Validation vulnerability in LibreOffice existed where determining if a macro was signed by a trusted author was done by only matching the serial number and issuer string of the used certificate with that of a trusted certificate. This is not sufficient to verify that the macro was actually signed with the certificate. An adversary could therefore create an arbitrary certificate with a serial number and an issuer string identical to a trusted certificate which LibreOffice would present as belonging to the trusted author, potentially leading to the user to execute arbitrary code contained in macros improperly trusted. This issue affects: The Document Foundation LibreOffice 7.2 versions prior to 7.2.7; 7.3 versions prior to 7.3.1.
LibreOffice supports digital signatures of ODF documents and macros within documents, presenting visual aids that no alteration of the document occurred since the last signing and that the signature is valid. An Improper Certificate Validation vulnerability in LibreOffice allowed an attacker to create a digitally signed ODF document, by manipulating the documentsignatures.xml or macrosignatures.xml stream within the document to contain both "X509Data" and "KeyValue" children of the "KeyInfo" tag, which when opened caused LibreOffice to verify using the "KeyValue" but to report verification with the unrelated "X509Data" value. This issue affects: The Document Foundation LibreOffice 7.2 versions prior to 7.2.5.