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CVE-2023-29491

Publication date 14 April 2023

Last updated 24 July 2024

Ubuntu priority

Medium

Why this priority?

Cvss 3 Severity Score

7.8 · High

Score breakdown

ncurses before 6.4 20230408, when used by a setuid application, allows local users to trigger security-relevant memory corruption via malformed data in a terminfo database file that is found in $HOME/.terminfo or reached via the TERMINFO or TERM environment variable.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Package Ubuntu Release Status
ncurses 23.04 lunar
Fixed 6.4-2ubuntu0.1
22.10 kinetic
Fixed 6.3+20220423-2ubuntu0.1
22.04 LTS jammy
Fixed 6.3-2ubuntu0.1
20.04 LTS focal
Fixed 6.2-0ubuntu2.1
18.04 LTS bionic
Fixed 6.1-1ubuntu1.18.04.1
16.04 LTS xenial
14.04 LTS trusty

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Notes

rodrigo-zaiden

upstream commit has miscellaneous changes besides the security fix.

mdeslaur

TODO: investigate why ncurses is built without "with_root_environ=no" build option, that should be the default going forward to prevent these types of issues.

ccdm94

applying the upstream patch of ncurses that fixes this issue to focal and earlier would have been too intrusive, since changes such as the various made by commit 790a85db were not present in their versions of this package. Setting the --disable-root-environ option with a few additional changes to the code (as done by Debian in version 6.4-3 of the package) allows us to mitigate this issue and avoid other issues that involve the possibility of malicious use of environment variables through setuid applications, and, therefore, it was the fix chosen in order to resolve this vulnerability.

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package Patch details
ncurses

Severity score breakdown

Parameter Value
Base score 7.8 · High
Attack vector Local
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality High
Integrity impact High
Availability impact High
Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H