Vulnerability in Shadow Project
CVE-2018-7169
An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5. newgidmap (in shadow-utils) is setuid and allows an unprivileged user to be placed in a user namespace where setgroups(2) is permitted. This allows an attacker to remove themselves from a supplementary group, which may allow access to certain filesystem paths if the administrator has used "group blacklisting" (e.g., chmod g-rwx) to restrict access to paths. This flaw effectively reverts a security feature in the kernel (in particular, the /proc/self/setgroups knob) to prevent this sort of privilege escalation.
EPSS: 0.016 (72.8th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 5.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N.
Affected products
- Shadow_project Shadow — versions 4.5
- N/a — versions n/a
Weakness classification (CWE)
Public proof-of-concept exploits
References
- cve@mitre.org (Exploit, Third Party Advisory, x_refsource_MISC, Issue Tracking)
- cve@mitre.org (vendor-advisory, Third Party Advisory, x_refsource_GENTOO)
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2018-7169?
- CVE-2018-7169 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Shadow Project, classified under Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource. CVSS score: 5.3/10. Published 2018-02-15.
- How severe is CVE-2018-7169?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.3 out of 10.
- Is CVE-2018-7169 known to be exploited?
- 7 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.