Apport reads and writes information on a crashed process to /proc/pid with elevated privileges. Apport then determines which user the crashed process belongs to by reading /proc/pid through getpidinfo() in data/apport. An unprivileged user could exploit this to read information about a privileged running process by exploiting PID recycling. This information could then be used to obtain ASLR offsets for a process with an existing memory corruption vulnerability. The initial fix introduced regressions in the Python Apport library due to a missing argument in Report.addprocenviron in apport/report.py. It also caused an autopkgtest failure when reading /proc/pid and with Python 2 compatibility by reading /proc maps. The initial and subsequent regression fixes are in 2.20.11-0ubuntu16, 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.6, 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.12, 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.22 and 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.29+esm3.

Last updated 25 August 2025

The crash reporting feature in Apport 2.13 through 2.17.x before 2.17.1 allows local users to gain privileges via a crafted usr/share/apport/apport file in a namespace (container).

Apport 2.13 through 2.20.7 does not properly handle crashes originating from a PID namespace allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion or possibly gain root privileges, a different vulnerability than CVE-2017-14179.

isclosingsession() allows users to consume RAM in the Apport process

~/.config/apport/settings parsing is vulnerable to "billion laughs" attack

Apport argument parsing mishandles filename splitting on older kernels resulting in argument spoofing

Apport does not disable python crash handler before entering chroot

isclosingsession() allows users to fill up apport.log

isclosingsession() allows users to create arbitrary tcp dbus connections

Kevin Backhouse discovered that apport would read a user-supplied configuration file with elevated privileges. By replacing the file with a symbolic link, a user could get apport to read any file on the system as root, with unknown consequences.

Last updated 25 August 2025

Apport before 0.108.4 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, before 0.119.2 on Ubuntu 8.10, and before 1.0-0ubuntu5.2 on Ubuntu 9.04 does not properly remove files from the application's crash-report directory, which allows local users to delete arbitrary files via unspecified vectors.

kernelcrashdump in Apport before 2.19 allows local users to cause a denial of service (disk consumption) or possibly gain privileges via a (1) symlink or (2) hard link attack on /var/crash/vmcore.log.

An issue was discovered in Apport before 2.20.4. A malicious Apport crash file can contain a restart command in RespawnCommand or ProcCmdline fields. This command will be executed if a user clicks the Relaunch button on the Apport prompt from the malicious crash file. The fix is to only show the Relaunch button on Apport crash files generated by local systems. The Relaunch button will be hidden when crash files are opened directly in Apport-GTK.

An issue was discovered in Apport before 2.20.4. In apport/ui.py, Apport reads the CrashDB field and it then evaluates the field as Python code if it begins with a "{". This allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary Python code.

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.