What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-16123: Bypass of snapd pulseaudio restrictions

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-12-04 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-362

Description

An Ubuntu-specific patch in PulseAudio created a race condition where the snap policy module would fail to identify a client connection from a snap as coming from a snap if SCM_CREDENTIALS were missing, allowing the snap to connect to PulseAudio without proper confinement. This could be exploited by an attacker to expose sensitive information. Fixed in 1:13.99.3-1ubuntu2, 1:13.99.2-1ubuntu2.1, 1:13.99.1-1ubuntu3.8, 1:11.1-1ubuntu7.11, and 1:8.0-0ubuntu3.15.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 20.10

References

• https://launchpad.net/bugs/1895928
• https://ubuntu.com/USN-4640-1
• https://launchpad.net/bugs/1895928
• https://ubuntu.com/USN-4640-1

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