A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Canonical's snapd package which could be exploited to gain administrator privileges and root access to affected Linux systems. The security issue has been dubbed Dirty_Sock and assigned the code CVE-2019-7304.
Chris Moberly found a privilege escalation vulnerability in the snapd API. This is installed by default in Ubuntu -- under which proofs of concept have been tested and found to work "100% of the time on fresh, default installations of Ubuntu Server and Desktop" -- but may also be present in numerous other Linux distros.
The Ubuntu CVE Tracker describes the vulnerability as: "snapd 2.28 through 2.37 incorrectly validated and parsed the remote socket address when performing access controls on its UNIX socket. A local attacker could use this to access privileged socket APIs and obtain administrator privileges".