[UNIX] AbiWord Link Grammar separate_sentence() Buffer Overflow

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AbiWord Link Grammar separate_sentence() Buffer Overflow
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SUMMARY

The <http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/> Link Grammar Parser
is "a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original
theory of English syntax. Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a
syntactic structure, which consists of a set of labeled links connecting
pairs of words. The parser also produces a "constituent" representation
of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.)." Secunia
Research has discovered a vulnerability in AbiWord Link Grammar, which can
be exploited by malicious people to compromise an application using the
library.

DETAILS

Vulnerable Systems:
* AbiWord Link Grammar version 4.2.4

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the
"separate_word()" function in tokenize.c when processing overly long words
(over 61 bytes). This can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer
overflow via a specially crafted sentence passed to the
"separate_sentence()" function.

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.

Time Table:
23/10/2007 - Vendor notified.
23/10/2007 - vendor-sec notified.
24/10/2007 - Vendor response.
07/11/2007 - Public disclosure.

CVE Information:
<http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-5395>
CVE-2007-5395

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by Secunia Research.
The original article can be found at:
<http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2007-79/>

http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2007-79/

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