| CVE |
Vendors |
Products |
Updated |
CVSS v3.1 |
| Flatpak passes through arbitrary vendor-extension keys unmodified when exporting an application's Desktop Entry (.desktop) and D-Bus Service (.service) files, instead of validating against an allowlist. A malicious Flatpak app can use this to cause denial of service (e.g. forced application restart loops) or to influence host D-Bus/systemd activation behavior beyond what the sandbox is intended to permit. |
| Flatpak creates temporary child repository directories under the user cache with world-writable permissions (0777). On multi-user systems with a permissive umask, other local users could read or modify the temporary directory used while installing apps or runtimes, potentially causing installation failures (denial of service); tampered content would fail signature/digest verification rather than being trusted. |
| Flatpak writes the OCI repository authentication token with world-readable permissions (0644) in the system-helper's cache directory, allowing other local users on a multi-user system to read the token and impersonate the authenticated user against the OCI repository. Only OCI-based sources (e.g. as used by Fedora) are affected; libostree-based sources such as Flathub are not. |
| A malicious user can get read-access to files in the flatpak-system-helper context if a system OCI repository is configured, because the OCI code paths in the system helper follow symlinks when importing OCI images that are under the user's control. |
| By calling org.freedesktop.Flatpak.SystemHelper.CancelPull on another user's pull, the pull is not actually cancelled but removed from internal tracking, making it impossible for the owning user to stop it. Ongoing pulls cannot be stopped. |
| A malicious Flatpak extension can probe the host filesystem to determine what files and directories exist at arbitrary paths, and host directory listings can be disclosed to sandboxed applications using the extension. Additionally, unvalidated extension metadata can cause extension content to be mounted at unintended locations inside the sandbox. |
| Flatpak's process ID namespace separation does not prevent a sandboxed app's kill(0, signal) or killpg(0, signal) calls from reaching processes outside the sandbox that share the same process group. A malicious or compromised Flatpak app can use this to cause denial of service by terminating processes outside its sandbox, such as the desktop shell. |
| On a multi-user system, a user with an active local login session could downgrade a system-wide Flatpak app to an older version by removing the app's remote ref via the unprivileged system-helper RemoveLocalRef method, causing the anti-downgrade check to fail to find a reference date. A malicious local user could use this to expose other users of the same system to an app version with unfixed vulnerabilities. |
| The OCI delta stream parser read sizes as guint64 but passed them to GLib I/O and allocation functions expecting gsize (32 bits on 32-bit systems), causing undersized allocations while subsequent operations use the original 64-bit size, leading to heap buffer overflows. An attacker controlling an OCI registry can craft a delta stream that triggers this during flatpak install/update, potentially achieving code execution on 32-bit systems. |
| A malicious OCI registry can hardlink arbitrary host files into the extraction directory when a user installs or updates a Flatpak application from an OCI remote, allowing disclosure of arbitrary host file contents. For system-wide installs running as root, this includes sensitive files such as /etc/shadow. |
| If a malicious SDK container declares an extension point with a crafted `directory` path, and a developer runs `flatpak build-init --writable-sdk --sdk-extension` with that SDK, attacker-chosen files could be written outside the working directory, since the target path is resolved via a function that allows `..` traversal. |
| A malicious or compromised Flatpak repository can write attacker-controlled content to arbitrary locations on the host filesystem via extract_extra_data(). On system installs, the write happens as root. Two issues combine: `files/extra` is resolved via path operations that follow symlinks, and blob names from `xa.extra-data-sources` are not sanitized against `..` traversal. |
| A path traversal vulnerability in Flatpak's handling of the files/etc directory during app deployment allows a malicious Flatpak app to cause certain host system files (such as passwd, group, machine-id, or resolv.conf) to be emptied or replaced with a symlink when the app is installed or upgraded. In system-wide installations, the write is performed as root. |
| A path traversal vulnerability in Flatpak's handling of the export/bin directory during app deployment allows a malicious Flatpak app to cause deletion of attacker-chosen files outside the deployment directory when the app is installed or upgraded. In system-wide installations, the deletion is performed as root. |
| flatpak-builder is a tool to build flatpaks from source. From 1.4.5 to before 1.4.8, the license-files manifest key takes an array of paths to user defined licence files relative to the source directory of the module. The paths from that array are resolved using g_file_resolve_relative_path() and validated to stay inside the source directory using two checks - g_file_get_relative_path() which does not resolve symlinks and g_file_query_file_type() with G_FILE_QUERY_INFO_NOFOLLOW_SYMLINKS which only applies to the final path component. The copy operation runs on host. This can be exploited by using a crafted manifest and/or source to read arbitrary files from the host and capture them into the build output. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.4.8. |
| In Flatpak before 0.8.7, a third-party app repository could include malicious apps that contain files with inappropriate permissions, for example setuid or world-writable. The files are deployed with those permissions, which would let a local attacker run the setuid executable or write to the world-writable location. In the case of the "system helper" component, files deployed as part of the app are owned by root, so in the worst case they could be setuid root. |
| Flatpak is a Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework. A path traversal vulnerability affects versions of Flatpak prior to 1.12.3 and 1.10.6. flatpak-builder applies `finish-args` last in the build. At this point the build directory will have the full access that is specified in the manifest, so running `flatpak build` against it will gain those permissions. Normally this will not be done, so this is not problem. However, if `--mirror-screenshots-url` is specified, then flatpak-builder will launch `flatpak build --nofilesystem=host appstream-utils mirror-screenshots` after finalization, which can lead to issues even with the `--nofilesystem=host` protection. In normal use, the only issue is that these empty directories can be created wherever the user has write permissions. However, a malicious application could replace the `appstream-util` binary and potentially do something more hostile. This has been resolved in Flatpak 1.12.3 and 1.10.6 by changing the behaviour of `--nofilesystem=home` and `--nofilesystem=host`. |
| 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 terminator, only the content of the file from *before* the terminator gets compared to xa.metadata. Thus, any permissions that appear in the metadata file after a null terminator are applied at runtime but not shown to the user. So maliciously crafted apps can give themselves hidden permissions. Users who have Flatpaks installed from untrusted sources are at risk in case the Flatpak has a maliciously crafted metadata file, either initially or in an update. This issue is patched in versions 1.12.3 and 1.10.6. As a workaround, users can manually check the permissions of installed apps by checking the metadata file or the xa.metadata key on the commit metadata. |
| Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux. In Flatpack since version 0.9.4 and before version 1.10.2 has a vulnerability in the "file forwarding" feature which can be used by an attacker to gain access to files that would not ordinarily be allowed by the app's permissions. By putting the special tokens `@@` and/or `@@u` in the Exec field of a Flatpak app's .desktop file, a malicious app publisher can trick flatpak into behaving as though the user had chosen to open a target file with their Flatpak app, which automatically makes that file available to the Flatpak app. This is fixed in version 1.10.2. A minimal solution is the first commit "`Disallow @@ and @@U usage in desktop files`". The follow-up commits "`dir: Reserve the whole @@ prefix`" and "`dir: Refuse to export .desktop files with suspicious uses of @@ tokens`" are recommended, but not strictly required. As a workaround, avoid installing Flatpak apps from untrusted sources, or check the contents of the exported `.desktop` files in `exports/share/applications/*.desktop` (typically `~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications/*.desktop` and `/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/*.desktop`) to make sure that literal filenames do not follow `@@` or `@@u`. |
| Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux. A bug was discovered in the `flatpak-portal` service that can allow sandboxed applications to execute arbitrary code on the host system (a sandbox escape). This sandbox-escape bug is present in versions from 0.11.4 and before fixed versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0. The Flatpak portal D-Bus service (`flatpak-portal`, also known by its D-Bus service name `org.freedesktop.portal.Flatpak`) allows apps in a Flatpak sandbox to launch their own subprocesses in a new sandbox instance, either with the same security settings as the caller or with more restrictive security settings. For example, this is used in Flatpak-packaged web browsers such as Chromium to launch subprocesses that will process untrusted web content, and give those subprocesses a more restrictive sandbox than the browser itself. In vulnerable versions, the Flatpak portal service passes caller-specified environment variables to non-sandboxed processes on the host system, and in particular to the `flatpak run` command that is used to launch the new sandbox instance. A malicious or compromised Flatpak app could set environment variables that are trusted by the `flatpak run` command, and use them to execute arbitrary code that is not in a sandbox. As a workaround, this vulnerability can be mitigated by preventing the `flatpak-portal` service from starting, but that mitigation will prevent many Flatpak apps from working correctly. This is fixed in versions 1.8.5 and 1.10.0. |
