CVE-2020-13696

Publication date 8 June 2020

Last updated 26 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

An issue was discovered in LinuxTV xawtv before 3.107. The function dev_open() in v4l-conf.c does not perform sufficient checks to prevent an unprivileged caller of the program from opening unintended filesystem paths. This allows a local attacker with access to the v4l-conf setuid-root program to test for the existence of arbitrary files and to trigger an open on arbitrary files with mode O_RDWR. To achieve this, relative path components need to be added to the device path, as demonstrated by a v4l-conf -c /dev/../root/.bash_history command.

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
xawtv	25.10 questing	Not affected
	25.04 plucky	Not affected
	24.10 oracular	Not affected
	24.04 LTS noble	Not affected
	23.10 mantic	Not affected
	23.04 lunar	Not affected
	22.10 kinetic	Not affected
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not affected
	21.10 impish	Not affected
	21.04 hirsute	Not affected
	20.10 groovy	Not affected
	20.04 LTS focal	Needs evaluation
	19.10 eoan	Ignored end of life
	18.04 LTS bionic	Needs evaluation
	16.04 LTS xenial	Fixed 3.103-3+deb8u1build0.16.04.1
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not in release

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	4.4 · Medium
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	Low
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	Low
Integrity impact	Low
Availability impact	None
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

References

Related Ubuntu Security Notices (USN)

USN-4518-1
xawtv vulnerability
17 September 2020