Privilege escalation in Elastic Apm Agent

CVE-2021-37941

A local privilege escalation issue was found with the APM Java agent, where a user on the system could attach a malicious file to an application running with the APM Java agent. Using this vector, a malicious or compromised user account could use the agent to run commands at a higher level of permissions than they possess. This vulnerability affects users that have set up the agent via the attacher cli 3, the attach API 2, as well as users that have enabled the profiling_inferred_spans_enabled option

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.8 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (9.7th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 10th percentile — 9.7% 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-2021-37941: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-37941?
CVE-2021-37941 is a high-severity vulnerability in Elastic Apm Agent, classified under Improper Privilege Management. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2021-12-08.
How severe is CVE-2021-37941?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.