USN-1616-1: Python 3.1 vulnerabilities

It was discovered that Python would prepend an empty string to sys.path under certain circumstances. A local attacker with write access to the current working directory could exploit this to execute arbitrary code. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2008-5983) It was discovered that the audioop module did not correctly perform input validation. If a user or automatated system were tricked into opening a crafted audio file, an attacker could cause a denial of service via application crash. These issues only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2010-1634, CVE-2010-2089) It was discovered that Python distutils contained a race condition when creating the ~/.pypirc file. A local attacker could exploit this to obtain sensitive information. (CVE-2011-4944) It was discovered that SimpleXMLRPCServer did not properly validate its input when handling HTTP POST requests. A remote attacker could exploit this to cause a denial of service via excessive CPU utilization. (CVE-2012-0845) It was discovered that Python was susceptible to hash algorithm attacks. An attacker could cause a denial of service under certian circumstances. This update adds the '-R' command line option and honors setting the PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to 'random' to salt str and datetime objects with an unpredictable value. (CVE-2012-1150) Serhiy Storchaka discovered that the UTF16 decoder in Python did not properly reset internal variables after error handling. An attacker could exploit this to cause a denial of service via memory corruption. (CVE-2012-2135)