USN-3157-1: Apport vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3157-1

14th December, 2016

apport vulnerabilities

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

Ubuntu 16.10
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Summary

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

Software description

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)