Several vulnerabilities have been found in file, a file type classification tool. Aaron Reffett reported a flaw in the way the file utility determined the type of Portable Executable (PE) format files, the executable format used on Windows. When processing a defective or intentionally prepared PE executable which contains invalid offset information, the file_strncmp routine will access memory that is out of bounds, causing file to crash. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project ID CVE-2014-2270 has been assigned to identify this flaw. Mike Frysinger reported that file's rule for detecting AWK scripts significantly slows down file. The regular expression to detect AWK files contained two star operators, which could be exploited to cause excessive backtracking in the regex engine.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 5.04-5+squeeze4. For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 5.11-2+deb7u2. For the testing distribution (jessie), these problems have been fixed in version 1:5.17-1. For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1:5.17-1. We recommend that you upgrade your file packages.

File tests each argument in an attempt to classify it. There are three sets of tests, performed in this order: filesystem tests, magic number tests, and language tests. The first test that succeeds causes the file type to be printed.

file on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2873.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25