David Airlie and Peter Hutterer of Red Hat discovered that xorg-server, the X.Org X server was vulnerable to an information disclosure flaw related to input handling and devices hotplug. When an X server is running but not on front (for example because of a VT switch), a newly plugged input device would still be recognized and handled by the X server, which would actually transmit input events to its clients on the background. This could allow an attacker to recover some input events not intended for the X clients, including sensitive information.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 2:1.7.7-16. For the testing distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2:1.12.4-6. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 2:1.12.4-6. We recommend that you upgrade your xorg-server packages.

The Xorg X server is an X server for several architectures and operating systems, which is derived from the XFree86 4.x series of X servers.

xorg-server on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2661.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25