Vulnerability in GNU Coreutils

CVE-2017-18018

In GNU Coreutils through 8.29, chown-core.c in chown and chgrp does not prevent replacement of a plain file with a symlink during use of the POSIX "-R -L" options, which allows local users to modify the ownership of arbitrary files by leveraging a race condition.

Vulnerability class: Race Condition

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.1 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.003 (26.9th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 27th percentile — 26.9% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2017-18018: held from 0.003 to 0.003.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.003 · newest: 0.003 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2017-18018?
CVE-2017-18018 is a high-severity vulnerability in GNU Coreutils, classified under Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization (Race Condition). CVSS score: 7.1/10. Published 2018-01-04.
How severe is CVE-2017-18018?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.1 out of 10.
Is CVE-2017-18018 known to be exploited?
31 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.