A locking protection bypass flaw was found in some versions of gnome-shell as shipped within CentOS Stream 8, when the Application menu or Window list GNOME extensions are enabled. This flaw allows a physical attacker who has access to a locked system to kill existing applications and start new ones as the locked user, even if the session is still locked.
The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gnome-shell | Gnome | * | 3.32.2 (excluding) |
Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.