14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has published details in a security notice about a number of GnuPG vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
The Ubuntu maintainers have uploaded a new version of the repositories that corrects a few security problems that have been identified by the developer of GNU privacy guard.
According to the security notice, "Hanno Böck discovered that GnuPG incorrectly handled certain malformed keyrings. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a malformed keyring, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause GnuPG to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrarily code."
This is just one of the issues found. For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users should upgrade their Linux distribution in order to correct this issue.
The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest gnupg2 and GnuPG packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, users can simply run the Update Manager application.
If you don't want to use the Software Updater, you can open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root):
[CODE=0]sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade[CODE=1]
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes and rebooting is not necessary.