Rdesktop

Rdesktop is a focused, widely used open-source Remote Desktop Protocol client for Unix and Linux systems, where its narrow product scope belies its presence across many enterprise and embedded deployments. Vulnerabilities affecting the vendor skew strongly toward critical-severity outcomes and frequently acquire public exploit code, reflecting the memory-safety challenges inherent to native protocol parsing and rendering in C. The exposure concentrates entirely within the rdesktop client itself and recurs through a durable pattern of memory-corruption weaknesses—out-of-bounds reads and writes, buffer over-reads, heap-based buffer overflows, and integer overflows—that arise from the parsing of untrusted RDP protocol streams and graphical data. These weakness classes are characteristic of legacy remote-access implementations and render the client vulnerable to network-based remote code execution; defenders should treat rdesktop updates as high-priority and audit instances connected to untrusted networks. Live exploitation activity, severity counts, and exposure breadth are shown alongside this summary.