Several vulnerabilities have been found in a2ps, an Anything to PostScript converter and pretty-printer. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: CVE-2001-1593 The spy_user function which is called when a2ps is invoked with the --debug flag insecurely used temporary files. CVE-2014-0466 Brian M. Carlson reported that a2ps's fixps script does not invoke gs with the -dSAFER option. Consequently executing fixps on a malicious PostScript file could result in files being deleted or arbitrary commands being executed with the privileges of the user running fixps.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 1:4.14-1.1+deb6u1. For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 1:4.14-1.1+deb7u1. For the testing distribution (jessie) and the unstable distribution (sid), these problems will be fixed soon. We recommend that you upgrade your a2ps packages.

GNU a2ps converts files into PostScript for printing or viewing. It uses a nice default format, usually two pages on each physical page, borders surrounding pages, headers with useful information (page number, printing date, file name or supplied header), line numbering, symbol substitution as well as pretty printing for a wide range of programming languages.

a2ps on Debian Linux

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

• http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2892.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25