• Bug#1102988: 10 year old browser is unsafe to use on the web

    From Plasma (David Paul)@21:1/5 to Ben Hutchings on Tue Apr 29 01:40:02 2025
    Control: severity -1 important

    On Sun, 13 Apr 2025 16:24:12 +0200
    Ben Hutchings <[email protected]> wrote:

    Source: dillo
    Version: 3.0.5-7
    Severity: serious
    Tags: security

    Following the recent discussion on debian-devel, I'm concerned that
    this package is still in stable and testing.

    There has been no new upstream version and absolutely minimal fixes in
    Debian for the last 10 years. While for some classes of software this
    would be fine, a web browser is constantly working with untrusted
    input, and a web browser written in C and C++ is likely to have many exploitable security vulnerabilties.

    I see no sign that it has already been fuzz tested by the previous
    upstream maintainer or the developers of the newer forks, so these vulnerabilities are more likely to be found by attackers than
    defenders.

    I understand that Dillo does have the advantage of not implementing Javascript, but there is still plenty of complexity in the formats it
    does handle. For comparison, see Vincent Sanders' accounts of fuzzing NetSurf, a similarly "light" browser project: <https://vincentsanders.blogspot.com/2016/08/down-rabbit-hole.html>, <https://vincentsanders.blogspot.com/2016/10/rabbit-of-caerbannog.html>.

    Ben.

    Removing dillo at this stage in the Trixie release process would result
    in removal of the src:claws-mail package on account of the claws-mail-dillo-viewer binary package depending upon it. Because
    Trixie soft freeze has begun, dropping binary packages from a source
    package is no longer appropriate, so dropping claw-mail-dillo-viewer is
    not straightforward.

    As of last year a new upstream maintainer for Dillo has stepped up and
    has made new releases (See https://dillo-browser.github.io/). While
    it's likely too late to get the latest release into trixie, there is
    the potential to get it into trixie-backports post-release.

    --
    Plasma

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