The security issues appear in a library supporting the portable network graphics (PNG) format, used widely by programs such as the Mozilla and Opera browsers and various e-mail clients. The most critical issue, a memory problem known as a buffer overflow, could allow specially created PNG graphics to execute a malicious program when the application loads the image.

Among the programs that use libPNG and are likely to be affected by the flaws are the Mail application on Apple Computer's Mac OS X, the Opera and Internet Explorer browsers on Windows, and the Mozilla and Netscape browsers on Solaris, according to independent security researcher Chris Evans, who discovered the issues. Apple and Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment. Evans did not test every platform to check which vulnerabilities work, he said.

By Robert Lemos at CNET.

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