Comment 2 for bug 262705

A security vulnerability in version 0.8.6i (and earlier) has been found:

http://www.videolan.org/security/sa0807.html

Patches are available from the source repostory.

Details
When parsing the header of an invalid TTA file, an integer overflow might happen causing an heap-based buffer overflow.
When parsing a response from an MMS server, an integer overflow might happen causing a stack-based buffer overflow.

Impact
If successful, a malicious third party could trigger execution of arbitrary code within the context of the VLC media player. However, because the integer overflows will cause an unusually large amount of memory to be read, a page fault is most likely to occur (segmentation fault on Unix systems, general protection fault on Windows), resulting in a termination of the VLC process.

Threat mitigation
Exploitation of this issue requires the user to explicitly open a specially crafted file, or access a malicious MMS server.

Workarounds
The user should refrain from opening files from untrusted third parties or accessing untrusted remote sites (or disable the VLC browser plugins), until the patch is applied.

Solution
VLC media player 0.9.1 addresses these issues. Patches for VLC media player 0.8.6 are available from the official VLC source code repository.