CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-8833

Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition

Published: Apr 22, 2020 | Modified: Oct 07, 2022
CVSS 3.x
4.7
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
1.9 LOW
AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Time-of-check Time-of-use Race Condition vulnerability on crash report ownership change in Apport allows for a possible privilege escalation opportunity. If fs.protected_symlinks is disabled, this can be exploited between the os.open and os.chown calls when the Apport cron script clears out crash files of size 0. A symlink with the same name as the deleted file can then be created upon which chown will be called, changing the file owner to root. Fixed in versions 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.23, 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.14, 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.8 and 2.20.11-0ubuntu22.

Weakness

The product checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource’s state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. This can cause the product to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Ubuntu_linux Canonical 14.04 (including) 14.04 (including)
Ubuntu_linux Canonical 16.04 (including) 16.04 (including)
Ubuntu_linux Canonical 18.04 (including) 18.04 (including)
Ubuntu_linux Canonical 19.10 (including) 19.10 (including)

Potential Mitigations

References