14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical published details about HPLIP vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
According to the company, several security issues have been fixed in HPLIP (HP Linux Printing and Imaging System).
For example, it has been discovered that the HPLIP Polkit daemon incorrectly handled temporary files. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to overwrite arbitrary files. In the default installation of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and higher, this should be prevented by the Yama link restrictions.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification.
The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest HPLIP package specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes and a restart will not be required.