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Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2022 12:22:57 +1030
From: Alex Murray <alex.murray@...onical.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: CVE-2021-4120: Insufficient validation of snap content interface
and layout paths
Hi,
Earlier today, two security vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44730,
CVE-2021-44731) in the snap-confine component of snapd were disclosed by
Qualys. These have been fixed in the snapd project by the 2.54.3 release
earlier today.
In addition to these two vulnerabilities in snap-confine, a third
vulnerability in snapd was independently discovered by Ian Johnson from
the snapd team, which was also resolved in the 2.54.3 release.
CVE-2021-4120
-------------------------------------------------------------------
snapd fails to perform sufficient validation of snap content interface and
layout paths, resulting in the ability for snaps to inject arbitrary
AppArmor policy rules via malformed content interface and layout
declarations and hence escape strict snap confinement.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H (8.2)
This vulnerability was reported via Launchpad against the snapd project
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1949368) - quoting from this:
Snapd does not properly or sufficiently validate the input strings used in
content interface plugs/slots, meaning that snaps can be installed with
strict confinement with malformed content interface slots which
effectively grant any AppArmor rule to the plug side.
To exploit this, create two snaps, one which provides the slot and one
which has a plug connected to the slot. For the purposes of the exploit,
these can just be local snaps, but note that a snap publisher could upload
both of these snaps to the store and the two snaps will have their
plug/slot auto-connected due to rules about auto-connection of matching
content interface plugs/slots for snaps of the same publisher.
The first snap has a content slot definition like this:
slots:
content-plug:
interface: content
content: mycont
read:
- "$SNAP/ rw, /** rw, } profile foobar (attach_disconnected) { /foo"
The embedded profile name does not really matter, but what is important is
that this rule has arbitrary apparmor rules embedded inside it, abusing
the "," character. For the plug side use a definition like this:
plugs:
content-plug:
interface: content
content: mycont
target: $SNAP_DATA/mycont
The plug side target does not matter at all, but the `content` attribute
must match the slot definition in order for the plug and slot to be
auto-connected.
What we are effectively doing is taking advantage of the fact that snapd
just validates that the read setting is a "clean" filepath, and does no
further validation and effectively ends up just copy-pasting the string
into various places inside an AppArmor profile without any quoting or
further validation.
There are really two profiles which get generated with this malicious
string without validation, the one for snap-update-ns of the plugging snap
in question, and the one for the snap itself. This actually presented
something of a problem, as for snap-update-ns, the string appears as part
of a mount rule source, which means that including other stuff here like
we do makes apparmor_parser fail to compile the file for snap-update-ns,
as it does not expect a mount rule to be formed like this. I still suspect
it is possible to craft a string such that it somehow is valid both as a
file source in a mount rule and as a file rule itself, but it turned out
that actually it doesn't need to be a valid rule for both profiles in
order to be exploited. This is because snapd just loads the profiles and
if they fail to be loaded, snapd does nothing about it. This means we can
craft a rule which is valid for just the profile for the app itself, (but
not for the profile of snap-update-ns), and still be able to use our
crafted rule. The one hiccup to this is that the mount namespace must
already exist, so that snap run does not need to invoke snap-update-ns,
otherwise presumably the exploit will not be exploitable since the app
cannot be run. It might be possible to also avoid this by using a daemon
and something like refresh-mode: endure, but I didn't take the time to
figure out all those details.
To be clear, with the above plug, for the plugging app snap we get this as
the tail end of the apparmor profile:
```
# In addition to the bind mount, add any AppArmor rules so that
# snaps may directly access the slot implementation's files
# read-only.
/snap/test-content-interface-escape-slot/x15/ rw, /** rw, } profile
snap-update-ns.test-content-interface-escape-plug2 (attach_disconnected) { /foo/** mrkix,
}
```
Which for the purposes of this bug just demonstrates that we can inject
arbitrary apparmor rules into the profile through the snap.yaml plug/slot
definition.
As stated above, to remediate this and the two vulnerabilities reported
by Qualys, the snapd team released snapd 2.54.3
(https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/releases/tag/2.54.3) earlier
today. In addition, Ubuntu published updates for snapd as detailed in
USN-5292-1 (https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-5292-1).
The details of the fixes can be found in the following merge commit
https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/commit/f3f669d720ed8b0bcb73da7789843bf43b5c16cf
in the snapd project.
The Ubuntu Security team would like to thank Qualys for their help in
the disclosure and coordination of the snap-confine issues.
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