Arbitrary Code Injection Affecting flatpak/flatpak package, versions [0.11.4,1.8.5)[1.9.1,1.10.0)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.05% (26th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-FLATPAKFLATPAK-2364938
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed14 Jan 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 14 Jan 2021

CVE-2021-21261  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-74  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade flatpak/flatpak to version 1.8.5, 1.10.0 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Injection. Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux. A bug was discovered in the flatpak-portal service that can allow sandboxed applications to execute arbitrary code on the host system (a sandbox escape). This sandbox-escape bug is present in versions from 0.11.4 and before fixed versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0. The Flatpak portal D-Bus service (flatpak-portal, also known by its D-Bus service name org.freedesktop.portal.Flatpak) allows apps in a Flatpak sandbox to launch their own subprocesses in a new sandbox instance, either with the same security settings as the caller or with more restrictive security settings. For example, this is used in Flatpak-packaged web browsers such as Chromium to launch subprocesses that will process untrusted web content, and give those subprocesses a more restrictive sandbox than the browser itself. In vulnerable versions, the Flatpak portal service passes caller-specified environment variables to non-sandboxed processes on the host system, and in particular to the flatpak run command that is used to launch the new sandbox instance. A malicious or compromised Flatpak app could set environment variables that are trusted by the flatpak run command, and use them to execute arbitrary code that is not in a sandbox. As a workaround, this vulnerability can be mitigated by preventing the flatpak-portal service from starting, but that mitigation will prevent many Flatpak apps from working correctly. This is fixed in versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0.

CVSS Scores

version 3.1