Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux. A bug was discovered in the `flatpak-portal` service that can allow sandboxed applications to execute arbitrary code on the host system (a sandbox escape). This sandbox-escape bug is present in versions from 0.11.4 and before fixed versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0. The Flatpak portal D-Bus service (`flatpak-portal`, also known by its D-Bus service name `org.freedesktop.portal.Flatpak`) allows apps in a Flatpak sandbox to launch their own subprocesses in a new sandbox instance, either with the same security settings as the caller or with more restrictive security settings. For example, this is used in Flatpak-packaged web browsers such as Chromium to launch subprocesses that will process untrusted web content, and give those subprocesses a more restrictive sandbox than the browser itself. In vulnerable versions, the Flatpak portal service passes caller-specified environment variables to non-sandboxed processes on the host system, and in particular to the `flatpak run` command that is used to launch the new sandbox instance. A malicious or compromised Flatpak app could set environment variables that are trusted by the `flatpak run` command, and use them to execute arbitrary code that is not in a sandbox. As a workaround, this vulnerability can be mitigated by preventing the `flatpak-portal` service from starting, but that mitigation will prevent many Flatpak apps from working correctly. This is fixed in versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0.
History

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cve-icon MITRE Information

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published: 2021-01-14T19:40:21

Updated: 2021-01-25T02:06:26

Reserved: 2020-12-22T00:00:00


Link: CVE-2021-21261

JSON object: View

cve-icon NVD Information

Status : Analyzed

Published: 2021-01-14T20:15:12.360

Modified: 2021-01-27T19:34:12.467


Link: CVE-2021-21261

JSON object: View

cve-icon Redhat Information

No data.

CWE