CVE-2005-4784: Austin Group Posix

Medium severity, CVSS 5.6. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Multiple buffer overflows in the POSIX readdir_r function, as used in multiple packages, allow local users to cause a denial of service and possibly execute arbitrary code via (1) a symlink attack that exploits a race condition between opendir and pathcon calls and changes the filesystem to one with a larger maximum directory-entry name length, or (2) possibly via programmer-introduced errors on operating systems with a small struct dirent, such as Solaris or BeOS, as demonstrated in packages including (a) gcj, (b) KDE, (c) libwww, (d) the Rudiments library, (e) teTeX, (f) xmail, (g) bfbtester, (h) ncftp, (i) netwib, (j) OpenOffice.org, (k) Pike, (l) reprepro, (m) Tcl, and (n) xgsmlib.

Affected products

Published 2005-12-31. Last modified 2026-06-16.