Flatpak releases version 1.18.2 with security and stability fixes

Flatpak has released version 1.18.2, a maintenance update providing eight targeted fixes for security vulnerabilities and system stability.

A primary security enhancement involves GVariant validation. The update adds pre-flight validation to repository metadata to prevent malicious or corrupted summaries from causing issues during parsing. This ensures that malformed data is rejected with explicit errors rather than producing incorrect results.

Stability improvements include a critical patch for the system helper to prevent crashes during parallel package installations or when iterating through cache directories. The update also addresses a D-Bus tracking issue during pull operations and fixes a sandbox-related problem where certain file descriptor remapping collisions could pass incorrect descriptors.

Additional fixes resolve issues with non-UTF-8 character corruption in error messages and restore build compatibility for legacy distributions using GLib versions older than 2.72.