USN-4661-1: Snapcraft vulnerability

3 December 2020

An intended access restriction could be bypassed in snaps built with Snapcraft

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Releases

Packages

Details

It was discovered that Snapcraft includes the current directory when
configuring LD_LIBRARY_PATH for application commands. If a user were
tricked into installing a malicious snap or downloading a malicious
library, under certain circumstances an attacker could exploit this to
affect strict mode snaps that have access to the library and when
launched from the directory containing the library.

Reduce your security exposure

Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04

For users of the snap package, Snapcraft will automatically refresh
itself to Snapcraft 4.4.4 which is unaffected. For users of the deb
package, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS, please perform a standard
system update. In either case, once Snapcraft has been updated, you need
to rebuild any packages built with the affected Snapcraft.

References

Join the discussion

Need help with your security needs?

Ubuntu Pro provides up to ten-year security coverage for over 23,000 open-source packages within the Ubuntu Main and Universe repositories.

Talk to an expert to find out what would work best for you

Further reading