1.60.  freetype

Updated freetype packages that fix various security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

FreeType is a free, high-quality, portable font engine that can open and manage font files. It also loads, hints, and renders individual glyphs efficiently. These packages provide the FreeType 2 font engine.

Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team discovered several integer overflow flaws in the FreeType 2 font engine. If a user loaded a carefully-crafted font file with an application linked against FreeType 2, it could cause the application to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. (CVE-2009-0946)

Users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct these issues. The X server must be restarted (log out, then log back in) for this update to take effect.