CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2017-7572 — Backintime Project Backintime security vulnerability
The _checkPolkitPrivilege function in serviceHelper.py in Back In Time (aka backintime) 1.1.18 and earlier uses a deprecated polkit authorization method (unix-process) that is subject to a race condition (time of check, time of use). With this authorization method, the owner of a process requesting a polkit operation is checked by polkitd via /proc/<pid>/status, by which time the requesting process may have been replaced by a different process with the same PID that has different privileges then the original requester.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 9.3 (2.0)
- Published
- 2017-04-06
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-362
Affected products
- backintime_project / backintime
Matched remediation archetype
Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
- Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
- Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.
Remediate safely
- Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
- Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
- Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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