Fedora 24 and ImageMagick

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Fedora 24 was released yesterday. According to the latest version of my ever-changing policy on Fedora upgrades, I should not upgrade to it until Fedora 25 beta is announced. Will I resist the urge to switch or will I just wait a couple of weeks until the mirrors are updated and common problems reported? I’m not sure but, in any case, congratulations to the Fedora project and everyone involved!

Now, there’s a thing that’s been worrying me for a few weeks. I’ll say in advance the security policy and response to vulnerabilities by the Fedora project is outstanding and amazing. Most times, when you find out about a vulnerability, either patches are already out for Fedora or the issue is already being worked on. But not in this specific case. Some weeks ago a set of interesting vulnerabilities were found in ImageMagick and received wide publicity on the Internet. Most of them only affect people who use ImageMagick to process user-submitted images in a way they cannot control, like in the backend of an image hosting service, for example. But a few days later we also got a vulnerability that could be triggered by attempting to process an attacker-controlled image, like an image you could have downloaded from anywhere or received by email.

With the first set of vulnerabilities, the recommended action was to modify the ImageMagick policy file, but no package upgrade has been published for Fedora 23 or 24 with an updated policy, as far as I know, so you need to modify the policy file yourself. The vulnerabilities discovered later have not had a corresponding fix in the form of a new package either. RHEL updates have been published, though, from what I see in the bug tracker, but Fedora has so far been left in the cold. I commented in the issue tracker a few weeks ago but nobody has replied so far. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

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