** Information type changed from Private Security to Public Security -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to lightdm in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1717490
Title: LightDM keeps plain text login password in memory Status in Light Display Manager: New Status in lightdm package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: The lightdm process keeps the user password in memory, if the lightdm- greeter is used. This seems to be the case on Ubuntu up to the recent 17.04 version. The issue was validated with lightdm 1.22.0-0ubuntu2 (17.04) and 1.10.6-0ubuntu1 (14.04) Example: root@victim:~# ps fauxw | grep lightdm root 889 0.0 0.2 379344 8436 ? SLsl 12:43 0:00 /usr/sbin/lightdm root 968 1.3 1.8 379900 72804 tty7 Ssl+ 12:43 0:01 \_ /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch root 1103 0.0 0.1 243564 6724 ? Sl 12:43 0:00 \_ lightdm --session-child 12 19 root 2074 0.0 0.0 21328 976 pts/0 S+ 12:45 0:00 \_ grep --color=auto lightdm root@victim:~# gcore 1103 [...] Saved corefile core.1103 root@victim:~# strings core.1103 | grep -A5 -B5 secretpassword ttyCH0 ttyCH1 #...ttyCH63 # Moxa Intellio serial _pammodutil_getspnam_svbl_2 secretpassword gkr_system_authtok -UN*X-FAIL-svbl svbl 1000:1000:svbl,,, /home/svbl root@victim:~# As far as I can tell it seems that the password is not cleared form memory after passing it to PAM. This is not a direct vulnerability or breaking a security boundary (root access required to dump the memory) but it seems not to be necessary for lightdm to keep the pw in memory. A similar issue was reported to gnome-keyring-daemon, where the need of keeping the password is a bit more understandable (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764014). Do you see any reason why LightDM needs to keep the password in memory? To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm/+bug/1717490/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp