Yesterday we released Amarok 1.4.10, an unanticipated security release. From the Release Anouncement you may notice that we gave thanks to Google Alerts for notifying us of this vulnerability. This was perfectly accurate.

I want to say up front that the security value of this vulnerability rates so low that it's amazing Secunia even bothered with it. It requires local access (or at least, a shell prompt), and it requires our code parsing a file whose name was hardcoded to execute the code (doesn't)/overflow a buffer (doesn't)/do things incorrectly (doesn't). At worst, you could maybe make Amarok crash, and since this would be a race condition, you'd have to be extremely lucky, and this could only happen between when the user was downloading the Magnatune database and when it was being parsed. Not exactly mission-critical. So, the actual threat of the vulnerability was approximately nil. That wasn't the driving factor behind the sudden release -- the driving factor was the fact that since Secunia did issue an advisory, we wanted to respond to it as soon as possible. Which should have been 36 hours before. Here's where the bungling comes in.

At midnight Tuesday morning, Dwayne Litzenberger posts a bug report on the public Debian bug tracker with snippets of code from Amarok, and the following:

I'm not familiar enough with Qt to be sure, but it looks to me like the code creating a temporary file insecurely. At minimum, I think this code will break if another user has already created /tmp/album_info.xml (thus preventing the current user from deleting it).

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