Microsoft Clip Art Buffer Overrun Vulnerability Patch 1

Microsoft has released a patch that eliminates a security vulnerability in the Microsoft® Clip Art Gallery. The vulnerability could allow a malicious party to cause hostile code to execute on the computer of a user of the Clip Art Gallery. The Microsoft Clip Art Gallery software is used toallow users to retrieve and use clip art in their documents. One of the features of the Clip Art Gallery allows the user to download additional clips from the Microsoft Clip Gallery Live web site, and then install that clip art on their computer. To do this, Clip Art Gallery and Clip Gallery Live use a file format called the CIL format to contain the newly downloaded clips. Under certain circumstances, a very long field embeddedin a clip art CIL file could cause a buffer overrun in the Clip Art Gallery software. The buffer overrun could cause the software to crash or, under certain circumstances, could cause the execution of hostile code on the computer where the Clip Art Gallery software was executing. The risk from this vulnerability results from the facts that any web site can host a CIL file and that clip art will normally be processed without prompting the user for confirmation as would be the case with an executable file format.