Kevin Backhouse discovered that apport would read a user-supplied configuration file with elevated privileges. By replacing the file with a symbolic link, a user could get apport to read any file on the system as root, with unknown consequences.

Sander Bos discovered a time of check to time of use (TOCTTOU) vulnerability in apport that allowed a user to cause core files to be written in arbitrary directories.

Sander Bos discovered Apport's lock file was in a world-writable directory which allowed all users to prevent crash handling.

Apport before versions 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.29+esm1, 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.19, 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.7, 2.20.10-0ubuntu27.1, 2.20.11-0ubuntu5 contained a TOCTTOU vulnerability when reading the users ~/.apport-ignore.xml file, which allows a local attacker to replace this file with a symlink to any other file on the system and so cause Apport to include the contents of this other file in the resulting crash report. The crash report could then be read by that user either by causing it to be uploaded and reported to Launchpad, or by leveraging some other vulnerability to read the resulting crash report, and so allow the user to read arbitrary files on the system.

Apport does not properly handle crashes originating from a PID namespace allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion, possibly gain root privileges, or escape from containers. The is_same_ns() function returns True when /proc/<global pid>/ does not exist in order to indicate that the crash should be handled in the global namespace rather than inside of a container. However, the portion of the data/apport code that decides whether or not to forward a crash to a container does not always replace sys.argv[1] with the value stored in the host_pid variable when /proc/<global pid>/ does not exist which results in the container pid being used in the global namespace. This flaw affects versions 2.20.8-0ubuntu4 through 2.20.9-0ubuntu7, 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.7, 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.8, 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.15 through 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.17, and 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.28.

Apport through 2.20.7 does not properly handle core dumps from setuid binaries allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion or possibly gain root privileges. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2015-1324.

Apport 2.13 through 2.20.7 does not properly handle crashes originating from a PID namespace allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion or possibly gain root privileges, a different vulnerability than CVE-2017-14179.

Apport before 2.13 does not properly handle crashes originating from a PID namespace allowing local users to create certain files as root which an attacker could leverage to perform a denial of service via resource exhaustion, possibly gain root privileges, or escape from containers.

An issue was discovered in Apport through 2.20.x. In apport/report.py, Apport sets the ExecutablePath field and it then uses the path to run package specific hooks without protecting against path traversal. This allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted .crash file.

An issue was discovered in Apport before 2.20.4. A malicious Apport crash file can contain a restart command in `RespawnCommand` or `ProcCmdline` fields. This command will be executed if a user clicks the Relaunch button on the Apport prompt from the malicious crash file. The fix is to only show the Relaunch button on Apport crash files generated by local systems. The Relaunch button will be hidden when crash files are opened directly in Apport-GTK.