CVE-2019-19882

HIGH

Shadow - Incorrect Permission Assignment

Title source: rule
STIX 2.1

Description

shadow 4.8, in certain circumstances affecting at least Gentoo, Arch Linux, and Void Linux, allows local users to obtain root access because setuid programs are misconfigured. Specifically, this affects shadow 4.8 when compiled using --with-libpam but without explicitly passing --disable-account-tools-setuid, and without a PAM configuration suitable for use with setuid account management tools. This combination leads to account management tools (groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, useradd, userdel, usermod) that can easily be used by unprivileged local users to escalate privileges to root in multiple ways. This issue became much more relevant in approximately December 2019 when an unrelated bug was fixed (i.e., the chmod calls to suidusbins were fixed in the upstream Makefile which is now included in the release version 4.8).

References (6)

Core 6
Core References
Patch, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/pull/199
Exploit, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64836
Exploit, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://bugs.gentoo.org/702252
Patch, Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/17580
Third Party Advisory vendor-advisory x_refsource_gentoo
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202008-09

Scores

CVSS v3 7.8
EPSS 0.0009
EPSS Percentile 25.9%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-732
Status published
Products (1)
shadow_project/shadow 4.8
Published Dec 18, 2019
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026