Description
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.
References (2)
Core 2
Core References
Exploit, Issue Tracking, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1729357
Third Party Advisory vendor-advisory
x_refsource_gentoo
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201805-09
Scores
CVSS v3
5.3
EPSS
0.0016
EPSS Percentile
36.8%
Attack Vector
NETWORK
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Details
CWE
CWE-732
Status
published
Products (1)
shadow_project/shadow
4.5
Published
Feb 15, 2018
Tracked Since
Feb 18, 2026