CVE-2019-12749: Critical severity IBM Security Guardium vulnerability

D-Bus could allow a remote attacker to bypass security restrictions, caused by symlink mishandling in the reference implementation of DBUSCOOKIESHA1 in the libdbus library. By manipulating a ~/.dbus-keyrings symlink, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to bypass DBUSCOOKIESHA1 authentication to allow a DBusServer with a different uid to read and write in arbitrary locations.

— IBM

dbus before 1.10.28, 1.12.x before 1.12.16, and 1.13.x before 1.13.12, as used in DBusServer in Canonical Upstart in Ubuntu 14.04 (and in some, less common, uses of dbus-daemon), allows cookie spoofing because of symlink mishandling in the reference implementation of DBUSCOOKIESHA1 in the libdbus library. (This only affects the DBUSCOOKIESHA1 authentication mechanism.) A malicious client with write access to its own home directory could manipulate a ~/.dbus-keyrings symlink to cause a DBusServer with a different uid to read and write in unintended locations. In the worst case, this could result in the DBusServer reusing a cookie that is known to the malicious client, and treating that cookie as evidence that a subsequent client connection came from an attacker-chosen uid, allowing authentication bypass.

— Launchpad