Problem description
The "sort_offline" function used by texindex(1) employs the "maketempname" function, which produces predictable file names and fails to validate that the paths do not exist.
Impact
These predictable temporary file names are problematic because they allow an attacker to take advantage of a race condition in order to execute a symlink attack, which could enable them to overwrite files on the system in the context of the user running the texindex(1) utility.
Workaround
No workaround is available, but the problematic code is only executed if the input file being processed is 500kB or more in length; as a result, users working with documents of less than several hundred pages are very unlikely to be affected.
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