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_se...
[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
epel-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Ben Beasley