Executive brief
A vulnerability exists in the GNOME component responsible for indexing and extracting metadata from media files. By tricking a user into downloading or opening a specially crafted MP3 file, an attacker can cause the indexing service to crash or potentially access sensitive information from the system's memory. This can lead to a disruption of system search services and a minor risk to data privacy.
Technical details
A heap buffer overflow (out-of-bounds read) exists in the `extract_performers_tags` function within `src/extractor/tracker-extract-mp3.c`. The vulnerability is caused by a missing bounds check when parsing ID3v2.4 tags, where the loop advances the position pointer beyond the allocated buffer size. This leads to an integer underflow in the remaining length calculation, which is subsequently passed to `g_convert`. Because the underflowed value is interpreted as -1, internal functions like `strlen` read past the buffer boundaries until they encounter a null byte or unmapped memory. This results in a SIGSEGV (Denial of Service) or the leakage of heap data. The attack requires a user to interact with a malicious MP3 file that the system then attempts to index.
Affected products
- GNOME localsearch (tracker-miners) unspecified
Timeline
- 2026-02-02: disclosed: Initial report in Red Hat Bugzilla
- 2026-06-16: advisory: NVD publication date