CVE-2016-9950

Publication date 14 December 2016

Last updated 25 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

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.

From the Ubuntu Security Team

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.

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
apport	17.04 zesty	Not affected
	16.10 yakkety	Fixed 2.20.3-0ubuntu8.2
	16.04 LTS xenial	Fixed 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.4
	14.04 LTS trusty	Fixed 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.23
	12.04 LTS precise	Fixed 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.15

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.8 · High
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

USN-3157-1
Apport vulnerabilities
14 December 2016