LibreOffice Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution Flaw

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Attack is triggered by a hovering mouse

Security researcher Alex Inführ has discovered a vulnerability in OpenOffice and LibreOffice that allows remote code execution.

In a blog post, Inführ wrote that he found a way to achieve remote code execution as soon as a user opens a malicious ODT file and moves their mouse over the document, without triggering a warning dialog.

He demonstrated proof of concept, in which he created a hyperlink and changed its color from the default blue to white so it would not raise suspicion. The link covered the whole page, increasing the chance of the user hovering the mouse over it. Remember, no clicking was needed, just hovering the mouse over the hyperlink was required to execute the payload.

The culprit here is the Python interpreter (pydoc.py) that comes with LibreOffice. It accepts commands and executes them via command line.

LibreOffice has already released a patch; a patch is also available for Windows versions of OpenOffice.

02/13/2019

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