Hello libgig maintainers and security team,

I have verified that all CVE still affect the latest version in Debian.
Most of them just lead to a denial of service (application crash).
CVE-2018-18193 leads to memory exhaustion and almost completely freezes
the system. The heap-based buffer overflows may have a more serious
impact depending on the situation. The upstream maintainer of libgig,
Christian Schoenebeck (CCed), was not aware of them. In a private
conversation Christian stated that

"The file types I mentioned above are always consciously, manually
opened by users (all in pro-audio context) with these applications, and
(except of .sf2 probably) are rather quite exotic file formats from an
average user's point of view. Most of our users either create those
files by themselves with our tools (e.g. with gigedit and/or gigtools)
or they are loading files from commercial sample library CDs dating back
between mid 1980s - mid 2000s (libgig started in 2003), and yet some
users share their files with close/trusted persons.

In short: the chance that somebody successfully attempts to use these
file types for security exploits that would really harm somebody
seriously in reality, is quite low."

I have the same impression and the risk of being affected by one of
these vulnerabilities is low because of the special file format and how
those files are created.

libgig was not designed to be secure and to process untrusted files.
Christian asked me that we should notify users about the situation, to
open only trusted files or in a sandboxed environment, and I suggested
to add a README.Debian file to libgig for clarification. I hereby
forward this request to the maintainers of libgig.

I have come to the conclusion that we won't spend time on fixing these
issues in Jessie because of the low security risk. Fixing those bugs is
not a development priority of upstream currently and Christian asked for
help and patches.

Regards,

Markus

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Reply via email to