CVE-2016-2856 Privilege escalation in n/a

What is CVE-2016-2856?

CVE-2016-2856 is a high-severity vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 14 Mar 2016. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

pt_chown in the glibc package before 2.19-18+deb8u4 on Debian jessie; the elibc package before 2.15-0ubuntu10.14 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and before 2.19-0ubuntu6.8 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS; and the glibc package before 2.21-0ubuntu4.2 on Ubuntu 15.10 and before 2.23-0ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.10 lacks a namespace check associated with file-descriptor passing, which allows local users to capture keystrokes and spoof data, and possibly gain privileges, via pts read and write operations, related to debian/sysdeps/linux.mk. NOTE: this is not considered a vulnerability in the upstream GNU C Library because the upstream documentation has a clear security recommendation against the --enable-pt_chown option.

Weakness: CWE-264

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-2856?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Debian Debian Linux.

How do I fix CVE-2016-2856?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2016-2856 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-2856 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 Exploit-DB entry.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-2856, GHSA-2wf2-64hh-9h2m, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-2856.