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HIGH

CVE-2021-43860

CVE-2021-43860 — Permissions granted to applications can be hidden from the user at install time

Flatpak is a Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework. Prior to versions 1.12.3 and 1.10.6, Flatpak doesn't properly validate that the permissions displayed to the user for an app at install time match the actual permissions granted to the app at runtime, in the case that there's a null byte in the metadata file of an app. Therefore apps can grant themselves permissions without the consent of the user. Flatpak shows permissions to the user during install by reading them from the "xa.metadata" key in the commit metadata. This cannot contain a null terminator, because it is an untrusted GVariant. Flatpak compares these permissions to the *actual* metadata, from the "metadata" file to ensure it wasn't lied to. However, the actual metadata contents are loaded in several places where they are read as simple C-style strings. That means that, if the metadata file includes a null…

Published Updated Sources: cvelistV5, GitHub_M

Triage

Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.

Exploitation

Unreported

no source claims exploitation

EPSS

1%

chance of exploitation in 30 days

Affects

flatpak

flatpak

CVSS base

8.2

HIGH

Affected scope

The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.

Vendors (1)

flatpak

Products (1)

flatpak

Every base score collected

Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.

ScoreVersionSeverityExpl.ImpactSource
8.2CVSS 3.1HIGH——cvelistV5

Weakness & attack patterns

  • CWE-269

Attack patterns reported against this CVE. The ATT&CK techniques below are inferred from its weakness class.

  • T1548Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism

References

11 on the record

Elsewhere on this site

  • flatpakevery CVE for this vendor
  • CWE-269other pages naming this weakness

Not in any source we poll

Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.

  • No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
  • No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
  • No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.