this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Vulnerability in Fennec (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Imhotep to c/[email protected]
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any info on this?

edit: I just saw there's already a post
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/24219041

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's probably related to this: https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/merge_requests/63

F-droid Fennec had build problems lately due to google removing big dependencies from its android package repo or whatever, so it's well out of date for now. The latest version there has at least that one well-known security problem that was in the news a few weeks ago. I don't know why you're getting notified about it now, I have it installed and didn't see that. But if you're risk-averse then you probably shouldn't currently be using it to visit websites that might be malicious.

Recent comments over there suggest that progress is being made at last.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I use mull from f-droid, and f-droid started showing that when upgrading Today to version 1.21.1. No idea why until this f-droid app upgrade.

I guess the mull issue is the same. Both fennec and mull are at the same version on f-droid, 129.0.2, and both show in their anti-features that the app contains a known security vulnerability, indicating firefox has fixed several security vulnerabilities since 130.

Is it right to hope that once fennec can get distributed on f-droid, then mull will follow? I'm not planning to move away from mull.

Thanks !

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I use mull from f-droid, and f-droid started showing that when upgrading Today to version 1.21.1. No idea why until this f-droid app upgrade.

I guess the mull issue is the same. Both fennec and mull are at the same version on f-droid, 129.0.2, and both show in their anti-features that the app contains a known security vulnerability, indicating firefox has fixed several security vulnerabilities since 130.

divestOS repo is on 131.0.3 for mull

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh, you mean using divestos-fdroid-repo? Well, before it became part of official f-droid I used to do that. I'm not sure how long it'll take to fix the official f-droid.org builds though, since I'd like to go back to it. The sad thing is that to move from one repo to another one loses all configurations/settings, :( But perhaps it's truly unsafe to wait until the build on f-droid.org gets fixed, if it ever does it.

Anyone aware if there are efforts to get it back building for f-droid.org? Does it depend on the Fennec issue getting resolved?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yes, there are efforts to build these two and more apps affected by the issue preventing updates to be built

The issue preventing updates should be resolved soon thanks to @linsui fixing it!

Source: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/fennec-vulnerability-recommended-to-uninstall/28826/2

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Cool, many thanks ! I'll just wait a littloe longer then...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure that's a great idea. I understand wanting to avoid the hassle of reinstalling Mull and having to go through all the Settings again (I just did that a couple of days ago), so if you want to keep your current F-Droid Mull install I'd recommend installing another updated flavour of Firefox, like Fennec or Iceraven, using FFUpdater (https://f-droid.org/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater/) and using that one until the updated Mull is pushed to the F-Droid official repository.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

good idea, thanks !

[–] Papanca 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mull too

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

You can install Mull via the divestos f-droid repo: https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps#repos Here's a discussion on this on a German IT security forum: https://www.kuketz-forum.de/t/sicherheitswarnung-fennec-und-mull-bei-f-droid/10025

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Wasn't Fennec a couple of major revisions behind due to build issues, and one of said major revisions was a zero-day fix, so yeah, Fennec would be vulnerable.

(I dumped it about two weeks ago once I noticed that it was behind the security patch curve.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Next time make a post 2 weeks ago. Best to voice concern over things you notice. The person who discovered the XZ backdoor did that and it caught a disaster.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Fennec being a delayed build has been a thing for years at this point: it's a pain in the ass to get built and in f-droid. I mean, just google 'fennec f-droid out of date' and you'll see people talking about this going back to 2020.

I didn't exactly find a stunning shocking unknown thing: Fennec is slow on builds, it got outdated, there was a zero-day in older Firefox versions, and so bam: there's a security issue in Fennec.

Might be worth adding the Firefox security RSS feed for anyone using Firefox or a derivative browser so that you've got the best information about issues like this.

[–] Imhotep 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So what do you use instead?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I just installed standard Firefox until they've sorted out their build issues.

[–] Imhotep 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

From the Play store/Aurora, or is there another way? I remember an app on fdroid that would install different mozilla browsers but I can't find it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You're thinking of FFUpdater

[–] Imhotep 3 points 1 month ago

That's the one. It doesn't come up when I search either firefox or mozilla

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not deGoogled, so I just did the play store version, so I'm not sure where else you might grab it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

APK Mirror?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Iceraven is one alternative worth considering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Don't use the unpatched version. I'd uninstall it personally. I fixed mine (Mull) by switching to the Divest repo.