New vulnerability fixes in Python 2.7 (and PyPy)

As you probably know (and aren’t necessarily happy about it), Gentoo is actively working on eliminating Python 2.7 support from packages until end of 2020. Nevertheless, we are going to keep the Python 2.7 interpreter much longer because of some build-time dependencies. While we do that, we consider it important to keep Python 2.7 as secure as possible.

The last Python 2.7 release was in April 2020. Since then, at least Gentoo and Fedora have backported CVE-2019-20907 (infinite loop in tarfile) fix to it, mostly because the patch from Python 3 applied cleanly to Python 2.7. I’ve indicated that Python 2.7 may contain more vulnerabilities, and two days ago I’ve finally gotten to audit it properly as part of bumping PyPy.

The result is matching two more vulnerabilities that were discovered in Python 3.6, and backporting fixes for them: CVE-2020-8492 (ReDoS in basic HTTP auth handling) and bpo-39603 (header injection via HTTP method). I am pleased to announce that Gentoo is probably the first distribution to address these issues, and our Python 2.7.18-r2 should not contain any known vulnerabilities. Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s safe from undiscovered problems.

While at it, I’ve also audited PyPy. Sadly, all current versions of PyPy2.7 were vulnerable to all aforementioned issues, plus partially to CVE-2019-18348 (header injection via hostname, fixed in 2.7.18). PyPy3.6 was even worse, missing 12 fixes from CPython 3.6. All these issues were fixed in Mercurial now, and should be part of 7.3.2 final.

New tools to help with package cleanups

Did you ever have had Croaker shout at you because you removed an old version that just happened to be still required by some other package? Did you have to run your cleanups past (slow-ish) CI just to avoid that? If you did, I have just released app-portage/mgorny-dev-scripts, version 6 that has a tool just for that!
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