An issue was discovered in LinuxTV xawtv before 3.107. The function dev_open() in v4l-conf.c does not perform sufficient checks to prevent an unprivileged caller of the program from opening unintended filesystem paths. This allows a local attacker with access to the v4l-conf setuid-root program to test for the existence of arbitrary files and to trigger an open on arbitrary files with mode O_RDWR. To achieve this, relative path components need to be added to the device path, as demonstrated by a v4l-conf -c /dev/../root/.bash_history command.

Affected: Ubuntu:16.04:LTS: xawtv

Matthias Gerstner discovered that xawtv incorrectly handled opening files. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to open and write to arbitrary files and escalate privileges. (CVE-2020-13696)