When I took over maintenance of the flintqs package[1]—which contains
William Hart’s quadratic sieve implementation, as modified for
sagemath—I built it for EPEL7, EPEL8, and EPEL9. My thoughts were, “Why
not? Someone might find it useful.”
It was recently pointed out[2][3] that the flintqs command-line tool
uses temporary files in unsafe ways[4], which could potentially
represent an exploitable security vulnerability; this has been assigned
CVE-2023-29465[5].
There is no immediate patch available; while one could surely be
constructed, the sagemath project plans to incorporate the factorization
algorithm directly in sagemath and discontinue support of the vulnerable
command-line tool rather than fixing it[6].
Since sagemath is not packaged in any of the EPEL releases, and flintqs
is therefore a leaf package, I plan to handle this security report by
retiring flintqs in all three EPELs. This email is the beginning of that
process as prescribed in the EPEL Retirement Policy: Process: Security
Reasons[7]. I doubt there will be any objections, but the process
requires a one-week discussion period, so I will follow up on the
epel-announce list and do the retirements no earlier than 2023-03-17.
[1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/flintqs
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2185301
[3] https://github.com/sagemath/FlintQS/issues/3
[4] https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Insecure_Temporary_File
[5] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-29465
[6] https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/35419
[7]
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/epel-policy-retirement/#process_security_reasons
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