USN-3157-1: Apport vulnerabilities

14 December 2016

Apport could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Releases

Packages

  • apport - automatically generate crash reports for debugging

Details

Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that the crash file parser in Apport
improperly treated the CrashDB field as python code. An attacker could
use this to convince a user to open a maliciously crafted crash file
and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of that user. This issue
only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-9949)

Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that Apport did not properly sanitize the
Package and SourcePackage fields in crash files before processing package
specific hooks. An attacker could use this to convince a user to open a
maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of that user. (CVE-2016-9950)

Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that Apport would offer to restart an
application based on the contents of the RespawnCommand or ProcCmdline
fields in a crash file. An attacker could use this to convince a user to
open a maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of that user. (CVE-2016-9951)

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 16.10
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

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

References

Join the discussion

Need help with your security needs?

Ubuntu Pro provides up to ten-year security coverage for over 23,000 open-source packages within the Ubuntu Main and Universe repositories.

Talk to an expert to find out what would work best for you

Further reading