CVE-2015-1803: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

High severity, CVSS 8.5. EPSS: 4.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The bdfReadCharacters function in bitmap/bdfread.c in X.Org libXfont before 1.4.9 and 1.5.x before 1.5.1 does not properly handle character bitmaps it cannot read, which allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted BDF font file.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 10.04 only; version 12.04 only; version 14.04 only; version 14.10 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 7.0 only
• X Libxfont: up to and including 1.4.8; version 1.5.0 only

Published 2015-03-20. Last modified 2026-06-17.