CVE-2024-32462

Flatpak vulnerable to a sandbox escape via RequestBackground portal due to bad argument parsing

State
Published
Severity
8.4 High
Published
Apr 18, 2024
Updated
Dec 16, 2025
Reserved
Apr 12, 2024

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux. in versions before 1.10.9, 1.12.9, 1.14.6, and 1.15.8, a malicious or compromised Flatpak app could execute arbitrary code outside its sandbox. Normally, the `--command` argument of `flatpak run` expects to be given a command to run in the specified Flatpak app, optionally along with some arguments. However it is possible to instead pass `bwrap` arguments to `--command=`, such as `--bind`. It's possible to pass an arbitrary `commandline` to the portal interface `org.freedesktop.portal.Background.RequestBackground` from within a Flatpak app. When this is converted into a `--command` and arguments, it achieves the same effect of passing arguments directly to `bwrap`, and thus can be used for a sandbox escape. The solution is to pass the `--` argument to `bwrap`, which makes it stop processing options. This has been supported since bubblewrap 0.3.0. All supported versions of Flatpak require at least that version of bubblewrap. xdg-desktop-portal version 1.18.4 will mitigate this vulnerability by only allowing Flatpak apps to create .desktop files for commands that do not start with --. The vulnerability is patched in 1.15.8, 1.10.9, 1.12.9, and 1.14.6.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.18.4 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-88 Improper Neutralization of Argument Delimiters in a Command ('Argument Injection')

Affected Products

ProductVersions
flatpakflatpak
  • < 1.10.9Affected
  • >= 1.12.0, < 1.12.9Affected
  • >= 1.14.0, < 1.14.6Affected
  • >= 1.15.0, < 1.15.8Affected

References

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