CVE-2020-13696: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 4.4. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 16.04 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 8.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 31 only; version 32 only
• Linuxtv Xawtv: before 3.107 (fixed in 3.107)
• Opensuse Backports Sle: version 15.0 only
• Opensuse Leap: version 15.1 only

Published 2020-06-08. Last modified 2026-06-17.