Race Condition in Canonical Apport

Summary

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).

Timeline

1. May 30, 2025, 5:37 PM UTCCVE published
2. May 30, 2025, 5:59 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. Nov 3, 2025, 8:05 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• apport

  From 2.20.1 · fixed in 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.30+esm5; From 2.20.9 · fixed in 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.29+esm1; From 2.20.11 · fixed in 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.28; From 2.20.11 · fixed in 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.7; From 2.28.1 · fixed in 2.28.1-0ubuntu3.6; From 2.30.0 · fixed in 2.30.0-0ubuntu4.3; From 2.32.0 · fixed in 2.32.0-0ubuntu5.1; From 2.32.0 · fixed in 2.33.0-0ubuntu1; From 2.20 · through 2.32.0

References 4