USN-4616-1: AccountsService vulnerabilities

3 November 2020

Several security issues were fixed in AccountsService.

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Details

Kevin Backhouse discovered that AccountsService incorrectly dropped
privileges. A local user could possibly use this issue to cause
AccountsService to crash or hang, resulting in a denial of service.
(CVE-2020-16126)

Kevin Backhouse discovered that AccountsService incorrectly handled reading
.pam_environment files. A local user could possibly use this issue to cause
AccountsService to crash or hang, resulting in a denial of service. This
issue only affected Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10. (CVE-2020-16127)

Matthias Gerstner discovered that AccountsService incorrectly handled
certain path checks. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to
read arbitrary files. This issue only affected Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu
18.04 LTS. (CVE-2018-14036)

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 20.10
Ubuntu 20.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make
all the necessary changes.

References

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