[Bug 1739532] Re: apport-collect SHOULD prune out /home/%USER/ from JournalErrors

[Brian Murray]

I recently modified apport so JournalErrors.txt actually consists of
errors and not also warnings and I believe that resolves this specific
issue although we could do a better job of searching for and replacing
user home directory names.

apport (2.20.8-0ubuntu9) bionic; urgency=medium

  * data/general-hooks/generic.py: change JournalErrors to contain errors not
    warnings. (LP: #1738581)

** Changed in: apport (Ubuntu)
       Status: Incomplete => Fix Released

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Title:
  apport-collect SHOULD prune out /home/%USER/ from JournalErrors

Status in apport package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  During https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
  shell/+bug/1739525, I ran apport-collect.

  I was happy to see that my hostname from the system logs was pruned to
  "hostname". Great!

  However, there are some logs that complain about /home/FOO user ... we
  SHOULD NOT leak a user's $HOME directory contents (a potential list of
  local user accounts) into these reports. This MAY be considered as
  sensitive information.

  The JournalErrors.txt should prune it.

  Example of CULPRITS:
  {{{
  Dec 20 21:39:20 hostname com.ubuntu.OneConf[3069]: WARNING:oneconf.hosts:Error in loading other_hosts file: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/FOO/.cache/oneconf/1dfe6d2e52223c637c7bddd900000002/other_hosts'
  Dec 20 21:39:33 hostname com.ubuntu.OneConf[18688]: WARNING:oneconf.hosts:Error in loading other_hosts file: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/BAR/.cache/oneconf/1dfe6d2e52223c637c7bddd900000002/other_hosts'
  }}}

  The suggestion here, is simply to also prune out usernames from ANY
  "/home/%USER" or "~%USER" type regexes.

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