Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the vim editor. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:
Ulf Härnhammar discovered that a format string flaw in helptags_one() from
src/ex_cmds.c (triggered through the helptags
command) can lead to the
execution of arbitrary code.
Editors often provide a way to embed editor configuration commands (aka modelines) which are executed once a file is opened. Harmful commands are filtered by a sandbox mechanism. It was discovered that function calls to writefile(), feedkeys() and system() were not filtered, allowing shell command execution with a carefully crafted file opened in vim.
For the oldstable distribution (sarge) these problems have been fixed in version 6.3-071+1sarge2. Sarge is not affected by CVE-2007-2438.
For the stable distribution (etch) these problems have been fixed in version 7.0-122+1etch3.
For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems have been fixed in version 7.1-056+1.
We recommend that you upgrade your vim packages.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.