A vulnerability (CVE-2024-42415) has been identified in the libgsf library, developed by the GNOME project, which may allow for code execution when processing a specially crafted file. This vulnerability is due to an integer overflow that leads to writing data outside the allocated buffer while processing the sector allocation table during the parsing of parameters from the file header in the CDF (Compound Document Format) format.
The libgsf library provides functions for parsing various structured file formats, including archives and document formats. In addition to applications like AbiWord, Gnumeric, GNOME Commander, and Nemo, the library is employed by the GNOME project in the tracker-miners search engine and is used as a dependency in the tracker-extract package, which automatically collects metadata about new files.
The danger lies in the fact that the GNOME service using libgsf automatically indexes and parses all files in the home directory without any user action. Thus, for an attack to be successful, it is necessary to have a specially created file appear in the user's directory (for example, in some cases, simply clicking a link in the browser is enough to place a file in the ~/Downloads directory) and the vulnerability will be exploited during its automatic indexing.
The vulnerability has been fixed in the libgsf library update 1.14.53. You can track the availability of updates in various distributions on the following pages: Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE/openSUSE, Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD. In most distributions with GNOME, the tracker-miners component is activated by default and loaded as a hard dependency for the Nautilus file manager (GNOME Files). To disable tracker-miners for the current user, you can use the following commands: systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service tracker reset --hard
Source: opennet.ru
