Synopsis:    Low: cups security and bug fix update
Issue Date:  2011-12-06
CVE Numbers: CVE-2011-2896


The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) provides a portable printing layer
for UNIX operating systems.

A heap-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)
decompression algorithm implementation used by the CUPS GIF image format
reader. An attacker could create a malicious GIF image file that, when
printed, could possibly cause CUPS to crash or, potentially, execute
arbitrary code with the privileges of the "lp" user. (CVE-2011-2896)

These updated cups packages also provide fixes for the following bugs:

* Previously CUPS was not correctly handling the language setting
LANG=en_US.ASCII. As a consequence lpadmin, lpstat and lpinfo binaries were
not displaying any output when the LANG=en_US.ASCII environment variable
was used. As a result of this update the problem is fixed and the expected
output is now displayed. 

* Previously the scheduler did not check for empty values of several
configuration directives. As a consequence it was possible for the CUPS
daemon (cupsd) to crash when a configuration file contained certain empty
values. With this update the problem is fixed and cupsd no longer crashes
when reading such a configuration file. 

* Previously when printing to a raw print queue, when using certain printer
models, CUPS was incorrectly sending SNMP queries. As a consequence there
was a noticeable 4-second delay between queueing the job and the start of
printing. With this update the problem is fixed and CUPS no longer tries to
collect SNMP supply and status information for raw print queues.

* Previously when using the BrowsePoll directive it could happen that the
CUPS printer polling daemon (cups-polld) began polling before the network
interfaces were set up after a system boot. CUPS was then caching the
failed hostname lookup. As a consequence no printers were found and the
error, "Host name lookup failure", was logged. With this update the code
that re-initializes the resolver after failure in cups-polld is fixed and
as a result CUPS will obtain the correct network settings to use in printer
discovery. 

* The MaxJobs directive controls the maximum number of print jobs that are
kept in memory. Previously, once the number of jobs reached the limit, the
CUPS system failed to automatically purge the data file associated with the
oldest completed job from the system in order to make room for a new print
job. This bug has been fixed, and the jobs beyond the set limit are now
properly purged. 

* The cups init script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/cups) uses the daemon function
(from /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions) to start the cups process, but previously
it did not source a configuration file from the /etc/sysconfig/ directory.
As a consequence, it was difficult to cleanly set the nice level or cgroup
for the cups daemon by setting the NICELEVEL or CGROUP_DAEMON variables.
With this update, the init script is fixed. 

All users of CUPS are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to resolve these issues. After installing this
update, the cupsd daemon will be restarted automatically.

SL6:
  i386
     cups-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-debuginfo-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-devel-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-libs-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-lpd-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-php-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
  x86_64
     cups-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm
     cups-debuginfo-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-debuginfo-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm
     cups-devel-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-devel-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm
     cups-libs-1.4.2-44.el6.i686.rpm
     cups-libs-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm
     cups-lpd-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm
     cups-php-1.4.2-44.el6.x86_64.rpm

- Scientific Linux Development Team