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

CVE-2020-8833

Medium
5.6/10

Summary

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.

  • HIGH
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • CHANGED
  • NONE
  • LOW
  • HIGH
  • NONE

CWE-367 - Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition

The software 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 software to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published