apport: Arbitrary file creation or overwrite via path traversal in base64-encoded problem report keys

In apport before 2.37.0, a path traversal vulnerability allows an attacker who can supply a crafted crash report to cause unintended file creation or overwrite outside the intended extraction directory when the report is processed with apport-unpack. The key-name validation added for CVE-2026-77113 does not cover base64-encoded keys skipped by ProblemReport.load(binary=False), and ProblemReport.extract_keys() writes them to a file path built from the key without validation. This allows an attacker to create or overwrite arbitrary files writable by the invoking user, such as .bashrc or .profile, gaining persistence or code execution in that user's context.

apport: Local privilege escalation to root via ldd execution on an attacker-controlled ExecutablePath in automatic crash report processing

In apport before 2.37.0, an improper privilege management vulnerability allows an unprivileged local attacker to gain root privileges on systems where automatic crash reporting is enabled. The automatic crash report processing pipeline runs as root and executes ldd on the attacker-controlled ExecutablePath field of a crash file placed in the world-writable /var/crash directory, causing the dynamic loader to load and execute an attacker-supplied audit module specified by the ELF's DT_AUDIT tag. This allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges and fully compromise the affected system.

Path Traversal Vulnerability in apport-unpack

Path traversal in apport-unpack in Canonical Apport before 2.36.0, 2.34.2, and 2.28.4 on Linux allows an attacker to create or overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the executing user via an attacker controlled key names in crash report files.

Ubuntu Apport Insecure File Permissions Vulnerability

It was discovered that process_crash() in data/apport in Canonical's Apport crash reporting tool may create crash files with incorrect group ownership, possibly exposing crash information beyond expected or intended groups.

Race Condition in Canonical Apport

Race condition in Canonical apport up to and including 2.32.0 allows a local attacker to leak sensitive information via PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces. When handling a crash, the function `_check_global_pid_and_forward`, which detects if the crashing process resided in a container, was being called before `consistency_checks`, which attempts to detect if the crashing process had been replaced. Because of this, if a process crashed and was quickly replaced with a containerized one, apport could be made to forward the core dump to the container, potentially leaking sensitive information. `consistency_checks` is now being called before `_check_global_pid_and_forward`. Additionally, given that the PID-reuse race condition cannot be reliably detected from userspace alone, crashes are only forwarded to containers if the kernel provided a pidfd, or if the crashing process was unprivileged (i.e., if dump mode == 1).

apport can be stalled by reading a FIFO

It was discovered that apport in data/apport did not properly open a report file to prevent hanging reads on a FIFO.

TOCTOU in apport

TOCTOU Race Condition vulnerability in apport allows a local attacker to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code. An attacker may exit the crashed process and exploit PID recycling to spawn a root process with the same PID as the crashed process, which can then be used to escalate privileges. Fixed in 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.24, 2.20.9 versions prior to 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.16 and 2.20.11 versions prior to 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.6. Was ZDI-CAN-11234.

Apport reads PID files with elevated privileges

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.

Sander Bos discovered Apport mishandled crash dumps originating from containers. This could be used by a local attacker to generate a crash report for a privileged process that is readable by an unprivileged user.

Apport 2.13 through 2.20.7 does not properly handle crashes originating from a PID namespace allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion or possibly gain root privileges, a different vulnerability than CVE-2017-14179.

Users can consume unlimited disk space in /var/crash

gdbus setgid privilege escalation

There is a race condition in the 'replaced executable' detection that, with the correct local configuration, allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code as root.

Apport can be tricked into connecting to arbitrary sockets as the root user

An issue was discovered in Apport before 2.20.4. In apport/ui.py, Apport reads the CrashDB field and it then evaluates the field as Python code if it begins with a "{". This allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary Python code.

kernel_crashdump in Apport before 2.19 allows local users to cause a denial of service (disk consumption) or possibly gain privileges via a (1) symlink or (2) hard link attack on /var/crash/vmcore.log.

An issue was discovered in Apport before 2.20.4. There is a path traversal issue in the Apport crash file "Package" and "SourcePackage" fields. These fields are used to build a path to the package specific hook files in the /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/ directory. An attacker can exploit this path traversal to execute arbitrary Python files from the local system.

is_closing_session() allows users to consume RAM in the Apport process

~/.config/apport/settings parsing is vulnerable to "billion laughs" attack

local privilege escalation in apport-cli

A privilege escalation attack was found in apport-cli 2.26.0 and earlier which is similar to CVE-2023-26604. If a system is specially configured to allow unprivileged users to run sudo apport-cli, less is configured as the pager, and the terminal size can be set: a local attacker can escalate privilege. It is extremely unlikely that a system administrator would configure sudo to allow unprivileged users to perform this class of exploit.