Two kids found a screensaver bypass in Linux Mint

The development team behind the Linux Mint distro has fixed a security flaw that could have allowed users to bypass the OS screensaver.

The maintainers of the Linux Mint project have addressed a security bug that could have allowed attackers to bypass the OS screensaver.

The curious aspect of this vulnerability is related to its discovery, in fact, it was found by two children that were playing on their dad’s computer.

The process is simple and allow the screensaver lock by-pass by crashing the screensaver and unlock the desktop via the virtual keyboard.

In order to reproduce the bypass on a locked system, click on the virtual keyboard, then type at the real keyboard while typing on the virtual keyboard, both at the same time, as many keys as possible.

“A few weeks ago, my kids wanted to hack my linux desktop, so they typed and clicked everywhere, while I was standing behind them looking at them play… when the screensaver core dumped and they actually hacked their way in! wow, those little hackers…” states a bug report on GitHub.

“I thought it was a unique incident, but they managed to do it a second time. So I’d consider this issue… reproducible… by kids. I tried to recreate the crash on my own with no success, maybe because it required more than 4 little hands typing and using the mouse on the virtual keyboard. Maybe not the best bug report, but I’ve seen the screenlock crash twice already with my own eyes, so its pretty real. One last thing, after the desktop is unlocked, I can’t re-lock it again, the screensaver process is pretty dead and requires me to open a shell and run ‘cinnamon-screensaver’ manually to get it working.”

Linux Mint lead developer Clement Lefebvre confirmed that the bug resides in the libcaribou, the on-screen keyboard (OSK) component that is part of the Cinnamon desktop environment used by Linux Mint.

“We’ll most likely patch libcaribou here” wrote Lefebvre. “We have two different issues:

In all versions of Cinnamon, the on-screen keyboard (launched from the menu) runs within the Cinnamon process and uses libcaribou. Pressing ē crashes Cinnamon.
In versions of Cinnamon 4.2 and higher, there’s a libcaribou OSK in the screensaver. Pressing ē there crashes the screensaver.”

The vulnerability is triggered when users press the “ē” key on the on-screen keyboard, this causes the crash of the Cinnamon desktop process. If the on-screen keyboard is opened from the screensaver, the bug crashes the screensaver allowing users to access the desktop.

The issue was introduced in the Linux Mint OS since the Xorg update to fix CVE-2020-25712 heap-buffer overflow in October. The bug affects all distributions running Cinnamon 4.2+ and any software using libcaribou.

The vulnerability was addressed with the release of a patch for Mint 19.x, Mint 20.x and LMDE 4.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Linux Mint)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.