Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2008-3533 to the following vulnerability: Format string vulnerability in the window_error function in yelp-window.c in yelp in Gnome after 2.19.90 and before 2.24 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via format string specifiers in an invalid URI on the command line, as demonstrated by use of yelp within (1) man or (2) ghelp URI handlers in Firefox, Evolution, and unspecified other programs. References: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=115890 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546364 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yelp/+bug/254860 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/30690 http://secunia.com/advisories/31465 http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/44449 Proposed patch: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=115890
CVE-2008-3533 This issue does not affect the versions of the yelp package, as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5. CVE-2008-3533: This issue affects the versions of the yelp package, as shipped with Fedora8, Fedora9 and Fedora10.
For the sake of completeness, among current Fedora versions, this issue only matters to Fedora 8. On Fedora 9, attempt to exploit this format string flaw is detected by glibc and will only result in controlled application shutdown. So we should consider having the fix included in F8's yelp soon, for F9+ this only needs to be treated as "crasher" bug triggered by some odd inputs.
yelp-2.20.0-12.fc8 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 8. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yelp-2.20.0-12.fc8
yelp-2.20.0-12.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
This issue was addressed in: Fedora: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-7293