This script is Copyright (C) 2012 Tenable Network Security, Inc.
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The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) provides a portable printing
layer for UNIX operating systems.
A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the Lempel-Ziv-Welch
(LZW) decompression algorithm implementation used by the CUPS GIF
image format reader. An attacker could create a malicious GIF image
file that, when printed, could possibly cause CUPS to crash or,
potentially, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the 'lp'
These updated cups packages also provide fixes for the following
- Previously CUPS was not correctly handling the language
setting LANG=en_US.ASCII. As a consequence lpadmin,
lpstat and lpinfo binaries were not displaying any
output when the LANG=en_US.ASCII environment variable
was used. As a result of this update the problem is
fixed and the expected output is now displayed.
- Previously the scheduler did not check for empty values
of several configuration directives. As a consequence it
was possible for the CUPS daemon (cupsd) to crash when a
configuration file contained certain empty values. With
this update the problem is fixed and cupsd no longer
crashes when reading such a configuration file.
- Previously when printing to a raw print queue, when
using certain printer models, CUPS was incorrectly
sending SNMP queries. As a consequence there was a
noticeable 4-second delay between queueing the job and
the start of printing. With this update the problem is
fixed and CUPS no longer tries to collect SNMP supply
and status information for raw print queues.
- Previously when using the BrowsePoll directive it could
happen that the CUPS printer polling daemon (cups-polld)
began polling before the network interfaces were set up
after a system boot. CUPS was then caching the failed
hostname lookup. As a consequence no printers were found
and the error, 'Host name lookup failure', was logged.
With this update the code that re-initializes the
resolver after failure in cups-polld is fixed and as a
result CUPS will obtain the correct network settings to
use in printer discovery.
- The MaxJobs directive controls the maximum number of
print jobs that are kept in memory. Previously, once the
number of jobs reached the limit, the CUPS system failed
to automatically purge the data file associated with the
oldest completed job from the system in order to make
room for a new print job. This bug has been fixed, and
the jobs beyond the set limit are now properly purged.
- The cups init script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/cups) uses the
daemon function (from /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions) to
start the cups process, but previously it did not source
a configuration file from the /etc/sysconfig/ directory.
As a consequence, it was difficult to cleanly set the
nice level or cgroup for the cups daemon by setting the
NICELEVEL or CGROUP_DAEMON variables. With this update,
the init script is fixed.
All users of CUPS are advised to upgrade to these updated packages,
which contain backported patches to resolve these issues. After
installing this update, the cupsd daemon will be restarted
See also :
Update the affected packages.
Risk factor :
Medium / CVSS Base Score : 5.1
Family: Scientific Linux Local Security Checks
Nessus Plugin ID: 61186 ()
CVE ID: CVE-2011-2896