apport vulnerability

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-1338  

Apport could be made to crash or overwrite files as an administrator.

Halfdog discovered that Apport incorrectly handled kernel crash dump files. A local attacker could use this issue to cause a denial of service, or possibly elevate privileges. The default symlink protections for affected releases should reduce the vulnerability to a denial of service.

24 September 2015

apport vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 15.04
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Summary

Apport could be made to crash or overwrite files as an administrator.

Software Description

  • apport - automatically generate crash reports for debugging

Details

Halfdog discovered that Apport incorrectly handled kernel crash dump files. A local attacker could use this issue to cause a denial of service, or possibly elevate privileges. The default symlink protections for affected releases should reduce the vulnerability to a denial of service.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 15.04
apport - 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.5
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
apport - 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.15
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
apport - 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.10

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References