My previous blog post seems to have resolved most concerns about my requests for Ubuntu stable release updates, but I again received rather a lot of criticism for the choice to make WebKit depend on OpenJPEG, even though my previous post explained clearly why there are are not any good alternatives.
I was surprised to receive a pointer to ffmpeg, which has its own JPEG 2000 decoder that I did not know about. However, we can immediately dismiss this option due to legal problems with depending on ffmpeg. I also received a pointer to a resurrected libjasper, which is interesting, but since libjasper was removed from Ubuntu, its status is not currently better than OpenJPEG.
But there is some good news! I have looked through Ubuntu’s security review of the OpenJPEG code and found some surprising results. Half the reported issues affect the library’s companion tools, not the library itself. And the other half of the issues affect the libmj2 library, a component of OpenJPEG that is not built by Ubuntu and not used by WebKit. So while these are real security issues that raise concerns about the quality of the OpenJPEG codebase, none of them actually affect OpenJPEG as used by WebKit. Yay!
The remaining concern is that huge input sizes might cause problems within the library that we don’t yet know about. We don’t know because OpenJPEG’s fuzzer discards huge images instead of testing them. Ubuntu’s security team thinks there’s a good chance that fixing the fuzzer could uncover currently-unknown multiplication overflow issues, for instance, a class of vulnerability that OpenJPEG has clearly had trouble with in the past. It would be good to see improvement on this front. I don’t think this qualifies as a security vulnerability, but it is certainly a security problem that would facilitate discovering currently-unknown vulnerabilities if fixed.
Still, on the whole, the situation is not anywhere near as bad as I’d thought. Let’s hope OpenJPEG can be included in Ubuntu main sooner rather than later!
