A vulnerability (CVE-2024-42415) has been discovered in the libgsf library developed by the GNOME project, which could lead to code execution when processing a specially crafted file. The vulnerability is caused by an integer overflow that results in data being written beyond the allocated buffer when handling the sector allocation table while parsing parameters from the headers of files in CDF (Compound Document Format).
The libgsf library provides functions for parsing various structured file formats, including archives and document formats. In addition to applications such as AbiWord, Gnumeric, GNOME Commander, and Nemo, the library is used by the GNOME project in the tracker-miners search engine and is a dependency in the tracker-extract package, which automatically gathers metadata about new files.
The danger lies in the fact that GNOME services using libgsf automatically index and parse all files in the home directory without any action from the user. Thus, for an attack to occur, a specially crafted file must appear in the user's directory (for example, in some cases, simply clicking a link in the browser is enough to place the file in the ~/Downloads folder), 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 distributions on the following pages: Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE/openSUSE, Fedora, Arch, FreeBSD. In most distributions with GNOME, the tracker-miners component is enabled by default and is loaded as a hard dependency for the Nautilus (GNOME Files) file manager. 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
Źródło: opennet.ru
