// For flags

CVE-2025-5054

Race Condition in Canonical Apport

Severity Score

4.7
*CVSS v3.1

Exploit Likelihood

*EPSS

Affected Versions

*CPE

Public Exploits

2
*Multiple Sources

Exploited in Wild

-
*KEV

Decision

Track*
*SSVC
Descriptions

Race condition in Canonical apport up to and including 2.32.0 allows a local attacker to leak sensitive information via PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces. When handling a crash, the function `_check_global_pid_and_forward`, which detects if the crashing process resided in a container, was being called before `consistency_checks`, which attempts to detect if the crashing process had been replaced. Because of this, if a process crashed and was quickly replaced with a containerized one, apport could be made to forward the core dump to the container, potentially leaking sensitive information. `consistency_checks` is now being called before `_check_global_pid_and_forward`. Additionally, given that the PID-reuse race condition cannot be reliably detected from userspace alone, crashes are only forwarded to containers if the kernel provided a pidfd, or if the crashing process was unprivileged (i.e., if dump mode == 1).

Qualys discovered a vulnerability in apport (Ubuntu's core-dump handler), and a similar vulnerability in systemd-coredump (which is the default core-dump handler on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and Fedora for example): a race condition that allows a local attacker to crash a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump (by quickly replacing the crashed SUID process with another process, before its /proc/pid/ files are analyzed by the vulnerable core-dump handler). This is older research from 2025 that was missing from the archive.

*Credits: Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU)
CVSS Scores
Attack Vector
Local
Attack Complexity
High
Privileges Required
Low
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
None
Availability
None
Attack Vector
Local
Attack Complexity
High
Authentication
Single
Confidentiality
Complete
Integrity
None
Availability
None
* Common Vulnerability Scoring System
SSVC
  • Decision:Track*
Exploitation
Poc
Automatable
No
Tech. Impact
Partial
* Organization's Worst-case Scenario
Timeline
  • 2025-05-21 CVE Reserved
  • 2025-05-30 CVE Published
  • 2025-06-09 First Exploit
  • 2025-11-03 CVE Updated
  • 2026-04-08 EPSS Updated
  • ---------- Exploited in Wild
  • ---------- KEV Due Date
CWE
  • CWE-362: Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization ('Race Condition')
CAPEC
  • CAPEC-26: Leveraging Race Conditions
Affected Vendors, Products, and Versions
Vendor Product Version Other Status
Vendor Product Version Other Status <-- --> Vendor Product Version Other Status
Canonical
Search vendor "Canonical"
Apport
Search vendor "Canonical" for product "Apport"
>= 2.20.0 <= 2.32.0
Search vendor "Canonical" for product "Apport" and version " >= 2.20.0 <= 2.32.0"
en
Affected