Apport reads and writes information on a crashed process to /proc/pid with elevated privileges. Apport then determines which user the crashed process belongs to by reading /proc/pid through get_pid_info() in data/apport. An unprivileged user could exploit this to read information about a privileged running process by exploiting PID recycling. This information could then be used to obtain ASLR offsets for a process with an existing memory corruption vulnerability. The initial fix introduced regressions in the Python Apport library due to a missing argument in Report.add_proc_environ in apport/report.py. It also caused an autopkgtest failure when reading /proc/pid and with Python 2 compatibility by reading /proc maps. The initial and subsequent regression fixes are in 2.20.11-0ubuntu16, 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.6, 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.12, 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.22 and 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.29+esm3.
The product performs an operation at a privilege level that is higher than the minimum level required, which creates new weaknesses or amplifies the consequences of other weaknesses.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apport | Apport_project | - (including) | - (including) |
| Apport | Ubuntu | bionic | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | devel | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | disco | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | eoan | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | trusty/esm | * |
| Apport | Ubuntu | xenial | * |
New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges. Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.