Security News > 2022 > February > New Linux Privilege Escalation Flaw Uncovered in Snap Package Manager

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Canonical's Snap software packaging and deployment system, the most critical of which can be exploited to escalate privilege to gain root privileges.

Snaps are self-contained application packages that are designed to work on operating systems that use the Linux kernel and can be installed using a tool called snapd.

Tracked as CVE-2021-44731, the issue concerns a privilege escalation flaw in the snap-confine function, a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications.

"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys, said, adding the weakness could be abused to "Obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu."

"A race condition in snap-confine exists when preparing a private mount namespace for a snap," the company noted.

"This could allow a local attacker to gain root privileges by bind-mounting their own contents inside the snap's private mount namespace and causing snap-confine to execute arbitrary code and hence privilege escalation."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/02/new-linux-privilege-escalation-flaw.html