It is suspected that this package is vulnerable to a security vulnerability in gnulib. As such we ask maintainers with packages suspected to be vulnerable to verify if the package is (or have been) affected. Please see the information contained in the tracker bug 600518. "If an application using parse_datetime(), such as touch or date, accepted untrusted input, it could cause the application to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code."
It's been a while since this bug was open, but right now, after the bump to octave-4.2.1, there is no implementation of parse_datetime() in the source code. Gentoo Security Padawan ChrisADR
After double checking prior versions of octave, all the sources were clean from parse_datetime() which means that they were never affected by this vulnerability. Closing as INVALID