CVE-2019-14822

Publication date 13 September 2019

Last updated 24 July 2024

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

A flaw was discovered in ibus in versions before 1.5.22 that allows any unprivileged user to monitor and send method calls to the ibus bus of another user due to a misconfiguration in the DBus server setup. A local attacker may use this flaw to intercept all keystrokes of a victim user who is using the graphical interface, change the input method engine, or modify other input related configurations of the victim user.

From the Ubuntu Security Team

Simon McVittie discovered that ibus did not enforce appropriate access controls on its private D-Bus socket. A local unprivileged user who discovers the ibus socket address of another user could exploit this to capture the key strokes of the other user.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
ibus	19.10 eoan	Fixed 1.5.21-1~exp2ubuntu2.1
	19.04 disco	Ignored end of life
	18.04 LTS bionic	Fixed 1.5.17-3ubuntu5.3
	16.04 LTS xenial	Fixed 1.5.11-1ubuntu2.4
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release

Notes

alexmurray

The ibus D-Bus socket address contains a long random guid making discovery of this address by another user unlikely.

mdeslaur

this was reverted in 4134-2 because of a regression, see LP bug

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
ibus	Upstream: 3d442db

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.1 · High
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	Low
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	None
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N