Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Affecting X.Org Server For 18 Years

CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation.

Introduced in the X.Org Server 1.1.1 release back in 2006, CVE-2024-9632 affects the X.Org Server as well as XWayland too. By providing a modified bitmap to the X.Org Server, a heap-based buffer overflow privilege escalation can occur.

This security issue is within _XkbSetCompatMap() and stems from not updating the heap size properly and can lead to local privilege escalation if the server is run as root or as a remote code execution with X11 over SSH.

The X.Org security advisory announcement can be read on the mailing list. The X.Org Server 21.1.4 and XWayland 24.1.4 releases fix the issue, which was discovered by the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. Trend Micro continues uncovering many X.Org security vulnerabilities over the years.