14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical published details about a JasPer vulnerability in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems. The problem is not serious, but it's not a bad idea to upgrade.
The developers from Canonical have released quite a few fixes these past few days and it looks like they have been busy. This latest patch for JasPer arrived with today's system upgrade and it corrects a small problem.
According to the security notice, "Jose Duart discovered that JasPer incorrectly handled certain malformed JPEG-2000 image files. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted JPEG-2000 image file, a remote attacker could cause JasPer to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with user privileges."
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
The flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest libjasper1 packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application.
If you don't want to use the Software Updater, you can do this from a terminal. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
