24
GNOME's Help Browser Affected By A Serious Security Issue For Arbitrary File Reads
(www.phoronix.com)
Ouch, how did this happen, and why have patches sat unreviewed?
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
24 points (92.9% liked)
Linux
53345 readers
1379 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Here they talk about the issue and its limitations and it seems they missed the workaround mentioned below in the writeup:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp/-/issues/221#note_2392999
This attack has some limitations:
- Attacker needs to know the unix username of the victim.
- Browsers ask the user for permission on redirects to custom schemes.
However, the initial current working directory (CWD) of applications started by GNOME (e.g., using Alt+F2 or dock shortcuts) is the user's home directory. As a result, the CWD of Chrome and Firefox is also set to the user's home directory. We can abuse this behavior to point to the victim's Downloads folder and bypass the first condition.
https://gist.github.com/parrot409/e970b155358d45b298d7024edd9b17f2