The 8.54 version of the Opera web browser could be exploited with a newly uncovered vulnerability in how it handles JPEG images.
The vulnerability does not exist in the recently released Opera 9 browser, and the company recommends upgrading to 9 from 8.54. An Opera engineer advised us that it was not likely they would do an incremental upgrade for 8.5x browsers.
If exploited by a maliciously crafted JPEG image, an integer overflow during image processing could lead to a buffer overflow, tracking firm Secunia advised in a statement. That condition could then permit execution of arbitrary code.
The original advisory at VigilantMinds described some more detail about the problem:
If excessively large height and width values are specified in certain fields of a JPEG file, an integer overflow may cause Opera to allocate insufficient memory for the image. This will lead to a buffer overflow when the image is loaded into memory, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary code.
Although upgrading to Opera 9 will eliminate this problem, VigilantMinds still recommends users should access the Internet from machines where limited usage accounts are in use.
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