CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root

Better to follow the link to the technical details and just read those: https://cdn2.qualys.com/advisory/2026/03/17/snap-confine-sys...

The article linked in the submission is more verbose but less clear and half of it is an advertisement for their product.

> As a side note, we also discovered a local vulnerability (a race condition) in the uutils coreutils (a Rust rewrite of the standard GNU coreutils -- ls, cp, rm, cat, sort, etc), which are installed by default in Ubuntu 25.10. This vulnerability was mitigated in Ubuntu 25.10 before its release (by replacing the uutils coreutils' rm with the standard GNU coreutils' rm), and would otherwise have resulted in an LPE (from any unprivileged user to full root) in the default installation of Ubuntu Desktop 25.10.

Shurely Shome mistake, not a vuln in holy rust!

systemd-tmpfiles bugs the heck out of me. It breaks so many applications for absolutely no good reason. A typical system of mine not running it gathers less than 1GiB per year of uptime in /tmp with disk sizes measured in TB. Even if you are /tmp on a 256GB NVME, that's less than 1% of your total disk per year of uptime. If you upgrade to alternating Ubuntu LTS editions (which requires a reboot every 4 years) systemd-tmpfiles will save you a maximum of 4GB of disk space.

I wonder if, and this is just speculating not trying to start an arguement, if this sort of thing could have happened in the simpler pre-snap, pre-systemd systems? More to the point is this a cause of using more complicated software?

The shared /tmp/ directory that can be used by processes of multiple users seems extremely prone to causing this type of issue. I wish there was a common convention for user-specific temp directories on Linux, because a whole class of vulnerabilities could go away.

MacOS handles this great by setting $TMPDIR to some /var/folders/.../ directory that's specific to the current user. Linux does have something similar with $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (generally /run/user/$UID/), though it's stored in memory only which is a little different from usual for /tmp/, seemingly mainly intended for small stuff like unix sockets.

I always wonder why Ubuntu is even on the radar anymore. It is a pile of questionable decisions with a billionaire ego bus factor. If you like apt, just use Debian. sid is fine for desktops if you are moderately technical.

Semi-related: does anybody know of a reliable API that announces CVEs as they're published?

Edit: for others who may be curious https://www.cve.org/Downloads

It is possible to just not use snap on ubuntu. The few ubuntu servers we have, even the couple with a minimal XFCE interface for some gui pieces, don't have snap installed. I realise local exploits happen all the time, but why add a whole new huge surface area if I don't have to.

The frustrating part is that Snap's confinement story was supposed to be a selling point. Here we are with a priv-esc in the daemon itself. At this point I've just disabled snapd on all our Ubuntu boxes and moved to flatpak or building from source. The attack surface of a privileged install daemon that parses arbitrary package manifests is just too broad.

Why does snap-confine need to be setuid, rather than use a user namespace?

Well, fuck snaps, that is.

Even though I've used ubuntu since 6.04, fuck snaps. I'm still stuck on Ubuntu even after 20 years. But fuck snaps.

When will these distros accept suid was a mistake and disable it. It has lead to critical local privilege escalation exploits so many times.

surprised this isn't talked about more

Eh. Definitely not great but until they make it so you can't trivially MitM sudo, I don't think any local privilege execution bugs on Linux are especially notable, at least for most desktop users. Also there's the whole xkcd "at least they can't install drivers" thing.

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