CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-15702 — TOCTOU Race Condition vulnerability in apport allows a local attacker to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code

High CVSS 7

TOCTOU Race Condition vulnerability in apport allows a local attacker to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code. An attacker may exit the crashed process and exploit PID recycling to spawn a root process with the same PID as the crashed process, which can then be used to escalate privileges. Fixed in 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.24, 2.20.9 versions prior to 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.16 and 2.20.11 versions prior to 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.6. Was ZDI-CAN-11234.

Severity
High
CVSS
7 (3.1)
Published
2020-08-06
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-367

Affected products

  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu8
  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu9
  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu10
  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu11
  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu12
  • canonical / apport / 2.20.11-0ubuntu13

Showing 6 representative product identities from 101 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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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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