CVE-2020-8833: Apport Project Apport

Medium severity, CVSS 4.7. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Time-of-check Time-of-use Race Condition vulnerability on crash report ownership change in Apport allows for a possible privilege escalation opportunity. If fs.protected_symlinks is disabled, this can be exploited between the os.open and os.chown calls when the Apport cron script clears out crash files of size 0. A symlink with the same name as the deleted file can then be created upon which chown will be called, changing the file owner to root. Fixed in versions 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.23, 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.14, 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.8 and 2.20.11-0ubuntu22.

Affected products

• Apport Project Apport: affected versions not specified
• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 14.04 only; version 16.04 only; version 18.04 only; version 19.10 only

Published 2020-04-22. Last modified 2026-06-17.