CVE-2025-5054: Race Condition in Canonical Apport

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2025-05-30 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-362

Description

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).

Affected products

Canonical apport: through 2.32.0
Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, 24.04, 24.10 (+1)

References

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