FreeType is a free, high-quality, portable font engine that can open and manage font files. It also loads, hints, and renders individual glyphs efficiently. The freetype packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 provide both the FreeType 1 and FreeType 2 font engines. The freetype packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provide only the FreeType 2 font engine. Two stack overflow flaws were found in the way the FreeType font engine processed certain Compact Font Format character strings . If a user loaded a specially-crafted font file with an application linked against FreeType, it could cause the application to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. Red Hat would like to thank Braden Thomas of the Apple Product Security team for reporting these issues. Note: CVE-2010-1797 only affects the FreeType 2 font engine. Users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct these issues. The X server must be restarted for this update to take effect.