• libwebp security hole and Mageia

    From William Unruh@2:250/1 to All on Mon Oct 16 21:28:49 2023
    At my university, we have just gotten a panicy email about a libwebp
    wide ranging vulnerability, Unfortunatly although long on dire warnings,
    it was short on facts. It seemed to say that that there could be many
    programs (in addition to Chrome) vulnerable (including all browsers, not just chrome)
    , and seemed to imply that many
    programs had compiled libwebp into the program.
    Mageian has a /lib64/libwebp libraries which date back to Sept 26 2023,
    and there seems to be an alert dated Oct 3
    (https://lwn.net/Articles/946306/) which seems to impy that Mageia had
    fixed this bug. But the week difference between libwebp files and the
    advisory makes me wonder if it has been fixed in Mageia already.

    Any insight and advice would be helpful.

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    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From David W. Hodgins@2:250/1 to All on Mon Oct 16 22:43:15 2023
    On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:28:49 -0400, William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:

    At my university, we have just gotten a panicy email about a libwebp
    wide ranging vulnerability, Unfortunatly although long on dire warnings,
    it was short on facts. It seemed to say that that there could be many programs (in addition to Chrome) vulnerable (including all browsers, not just chrome)
    , and seemed to imply that many
    programs had compiled libwebp into the program.
    Mageian has a /lib64/libwebp libraries which date back to Sept 26 2023,
    and there seems to be an alert dated Oct 3
    (https://lwn.net/Articles/946306/) which seems to impy that Mageia had
    fixed this bug. But the week difference between libwebp files and the advisory makes me wonder if it has been fixed in Mageia already.

    Any insight and advice would be helpful.

    Mageia does not bundle libwebp in the various browsers or other packages, so it only has the one package for the system that had to be fixed, instead of having to fix every program that processes content from the web.

    Mageia makes proper usage of libification. Flatpak and other things like rust's cargo system that bundle a copy of a working version of every library used by
    a program require much more work for security updates. Instead of updating one package, dozens of packages have to be updated. Such systems are a security nightmare. There are exceptions where some libraries are bundled, but only a few, and libwebp is not used by any of those.

    While proper usage of libification is much better from a security point of view,
    it's also the main reason that Mageia uses a stable release model instead of a rolling release model. With a rolling release, the problem is similar to using bundled libraries. Much more work involved in every library package update.

    Regards, Dave Hodgins

    --- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From TJ@2:250/1 to All on Tue Oct 17 00:03:09 2023
    On 2023-10-16 16:28, William Unruh wrote:
    At my university, we have just gotten a panicy email about a libwebp
    wide ranging vulnerability, Unfortunatly although long on dire warnings,
    it was short on facts. It seemed to say that that there could be many programs (in addition to Chrome) vulnerable (including all browsers, not just chrome)
    , and seemed to imply that many
    programs had compiled libwebp into the program.
    Mageian has a /lib64/libwebp libraries which date back to Sept 26 2023,
    and there seems to be an alert dated Oct 3
    (https://lwn.net/Articles/946306/) which seems to impy that Mageia had
    fixed this bug. But the week difference between libwebp files and the advisory makes me wonder if it has been fixed in Mageia already.

    Any insight and advice would be helpful.

    https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/documented-libwebp-security-vulnerability-looks-to-be-part-of-pegasus-blastpass-attack-chain/
    identifies the vulnerability as CVE-2023-4863.

    Searching Mageia's Bugzilla,
    https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32280 shows that this was fixed
    in both Mageia 8 and Mageia 9, and the update was pushed on October 3.

    TJ

    --- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From William Unruh@2:250/1 to All on Tue Oct 17 03:55:16 2023
    On 2023-10-16, TJ <TJ@noneofyour.business> wrote:
    On 2023-10-16 16:28, William Unruh wrote:
    At my university, we have just gotten a panicy email about a libwebp
    wide ranging vulnerability, Unfortunatly although long on dire warnings,
    it was short on facts. It seemed to say that that there could be many
    programs (in addition to Chrome) vulnerable (including all browsers, not just chrome)
    , and seemed to imply that many
    programs had compiled libwebp into the program.
    Mageian has a /lib64/libwebp libraries which date back to Sept 26 2023,
    and there seems to be an alert dated Oct 3
    (https://lwn.net/Articles/946306/) which seems to impy that Mageia had
    fixed this bug. But the week difference between libwebp files and the
    advisory makes me wonder if it has been fixed in Mageia already.

    Any insight and advice would be helpful.

    https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/documented-libwebp-security-vulnerability-looks-to-be-part-of-pegasus-blastpass-attack-chain/
    identifies the vulnerability as CVE-2023-4863.

    Searching Mageia's Bugzilla,
    https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32280 shows that this was fixed
    in both Mageia 8 and Mageia 9, and the update was pushed on October 3.

    But the latest lipwebp packages have a date of Sep 26, not Oct 3. I
    guess this could mean that they were compiled on Sep 26 but then,
    brcause of testing, the package was only put out (without recompilation)
    on Oct 3.


    TJ

    --- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From David W. Hodgins@2:250/1 to All on Tue Oct 17 05:20:02 2023
    On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 22:55:16 -0400, William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:
    But the latest lipwebp packages have a date of Sep 26, not Oct 3. I
    guess this could mean that they were compiled on Sep 26 but then,
    brcause of testing, the package was only put out (without recompilation)
    on Oct 3.

    https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32317#c5 (Sept. 29th) is when we became aware it was a zero day bug, which is after it was actually fixed.

    https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5129 was rejected as a dup of CVE-2023-4863.

    The updates that fixed it for Mageia users were in bug 32258 (firefox/tb), 32317
    (chromium) and 32280 for libwebp itself.

    Regards, Dave Hodgins

    --- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From William Unruh@2:250/1 to All on Wed Oct 18 22:14:10 2023
    On 2023-10-16, David W. Hodgins <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
    On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:28:49 -0400, William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:

    At my university, we have just gotten a panicy email about a libwebp
    wide ranging vulnerability, Unfortunatly although long on dire warnings,
    it was short on facts. It seemed to say that that there could be many
    programs (in addition to Chrome) vulnerable (including all browsers, not just chrome)
    , and seemed to imply that many
    programs had compiled libwebp into the program.
    Mageian has a /lib64/libwebp libraries which date back to Sept 26 2023,
    and there seems to be an alert dated Oct 3
    (https://lwn.net/Articles/946306/) which seems to impy that Mageia had
    fixed this bug. But the week difference between libwebp files and the
    advisory makes me wonder if it has been fixed in Mageia already.

    Any insight and advice would be helpful.

    Mageia does not bundle libwebp in the various browsers or other packages, so it
    only has the one package for the system that had to be fixed, instead of having
    to fix every program that processes content from the web.

    Mageia makes proper usage of libification. Flatpak and other things like rust's
    cargo system that bundle a copy of a working version of every library used by a program require much more work for security updates. Instead of updating one
    package, dozens of packages have to be updated. Such systems are a security nightmare. There are exceptions where some libraries are bundled, but only a few, and libwebp is not used by any of those.

    While proper usage of libification is much better from a security point of view,
    it's also the main reason that Mageia uses a stable release model instead of a
    rolling release model. With a rolling release, the problem is similar to using
    bundled libraries. Much more work involved in every library package update.

    Regards, Dave Hodgins

    I note that there is also a 32 bit version for libwebp, which is dated
    Sep 6, not Sept 26. Does it also contain the latest fix for this
    security flaw?

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    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)
  • From David W. Hodgins@2:250/1 to All on Wed Oct 18 23:40:38 2023
    On Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:14:10 -0400, William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:
    I note that there is also a 32 bit version for libwebp, which is dated
    Sep 6, not Sept 26. Does it also contain the latest fix for this
    security flaw?

    Where are you getting that date from?

    On m8 x86_64 with 32 bit repos enabled ...
    $ rpm -q -i lib64webp7 libwebp7|grep ^'Build Date'
    Build Date : 2023-09-14T09:54:41 EDT
    Build Date : 2023-09-14T09:55:36 EDT

    On m9 x86_64 ...
    $ rpm -q -i lib64webp7|grep ^'Build Date'
    Build Date : 2023-09-14T09:54:30 EDT

    On m9 i586 ...
    $ rpm -q -i libwebp7|grep ^'Build Date'
    Build Date : 2023-09-14T09:54:37 EDT

    Regards, Dave Hodgins

    --- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (2:250/1@fidonet)