CVE-2010-2498

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 5.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2010-08-19 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

The psh_glyph_find_strong_points function in pshinter/pshalgo.c in FreeType before 2.4.0 does not properly implement hinting masks, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (heap memory corruption and application crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted font file that triggers an invalid free operation.

Affected products

macOS: before 10.6.5 — fixed in 10.6.5
Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 8.04, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04
Debian Linux: 5.0
FreeType: before 2.4.0 — fixed in 2.4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: macOS 10.6.5; FreeType 2.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/commit/?id=8d22746c9e5af80ff4304aef440986403a5072e2
http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2010//Nov/msg00000.html
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype/2010-07/msg00001.html
http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=127905701201340&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=127909326909362&w=2
http://secunia.com/advisories/48951
http://securitytracker.com/id?1024266
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4435
http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2070
http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDVSA-2010:137
http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/RHSA-2010-0578.html
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-963-1

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