Published: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | Updated: Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Version: 1.1
General Information
Executive Summary
This security update resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft PowerPoint. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted PowerPoint file. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. The automated Microsoft Fix it solution for PowerPoint 2010, “Disable Edit in Protected View for PowerPoint 2010,” available in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 2501584, blocks the attack vectors for exploiting the vulnerabilities described in CVE-2011-0655 and CVE-2011-0656.
This security update is rated Important for all supported releases of Microsoft PowerPoint; Microsoft Office for Mac; Open XML File Format Converter for Mac; Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats; Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, and Microsoft PowerPoint Web App. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.
The update addresses the vulnerabilities by modifying the way that PowerPoint validates records when opening PowerPoint files. For more information about the vulnerability, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection for the specific vulnerability entry under the next section, Vulnerability Information.
Recommendation. Customers can configure automatic updating to check online for updates from Microsoft Update by using the Microsoft Update service. Customers who have automatic updating enabled and configured to check online for updates from Microsoft Update typically will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who have not enabled automatic updating need to check for updates from Microsoft Update and install this update manually. For information about specific configuration options in automatic updating in supported editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 294871. For information about automatic updating in supported editions of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2, see Understanding Windows automatic updating.
For administrators and enterprise installations, or end users who want to install this security update manually, Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update at the earliest opportunity using update management software, or by checking for updates using the Microsoft Update service.
See also the section, Detection and Deployment Tools and Guidance, later in this bulletin.
Known Issues. Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 2489283 documents the currently known issues that customers may experience when installing this security update. The article also documents recommended solutions for these issues. When currently known issues and recommended solutions pertain only to specific releases of this software, this article provides links to further articles.
