Perfect example of a (part of a) security vulnerability being fixed in a commit that doesn't immediately seem security related and would never be back ported to a ~~stable~~stale distro
The code which parses the binary MaxMind database after decompression is well guarded as of 2024 but used to look different, potentially providing more attack surface. There is also an interesting commit where a contributor makes adjustments to the
gzip::decompress()
function which hints at a stack overflow, as the destination buffer was changed from static allocation on the stack to dynamic allocation on the heap, though it was not exploitable due to checks before it is written to
I don't exactly consider Drew Devault a reliable or unbiased judge of character