As previously proposed on the epel-devel mailing list, and in accordance
with the EPEL Retirement Policy: Process: Security Reasons[1], I will be
retiring the flintqs package in EPEL7, EPEL8, and EPEL9 today.
When I took over maintenance of the flintqs package[2]—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[3][4] that the flintqs command-line tool
uses temporary files in unsafe ways[5], which could potentially
represent an exploitable security vulnerability; this has been assigned
CVE-2023-29465[6].
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[7].
Since sagemath is not packaged in any of the EPEL releases, and flintqs
is therefore a leaf package, I am handling this security report by
retiring flintqs in all three EPELs.
Anyone who does need FlintQS on EL will need to consider their security
threat model, then build it from source—either by cloning the upstream
GitHub repository, or, for the time being, by rebuilding the Fedora
source RPM. Note, however, that the Fedora package will also be retired
as soon as it is no longer needed by sagemath.
[1]
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/epel-policy-retirement/#process_security_reasons
[2] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/flintqs
[3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2185301
[4] https://github.com/sagemath/FlintQS/issues/3
[5] https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Insecure_Temporary_File
[6] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-29465
[7] https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/35419
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