Reliably Exploiting Apport in Ubuntu
[Donncha O’Cearbhaill] has successfully exploited two flaws in Apport, the crash report mechanism in Ubuntu. Apport is installed by default in all Ubuntu Desktop installations >= 12.10 (Quantal). Inspired by [Chris Evan] work on exploiting 6502 processor opcodes on the NES, [Donncha] describes the whole process of finding and exploiting a 0-day on a modern linux system.
One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2016-9949, relies on a python code injection in the crash file. Apport blindly uses the python eval() function on an unsanitized field (CrashDB) inside the .crash file. This leads directly to arbitrary python code execution. The other …read more
