CVE-2021-3982

MEDIUM

gnome-shell - Privilege Escalation via CAP_SYS_NICE Misuse

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

Linux distributions using CAP_SYS_NICE for gnome-shell may be exposed to a privilege escalation issue. An attacker, with low privilege permissions, may take advantage of the way CAP_SYS_NICE is currently implemented and eventually load code to increase its process scheduler priority leading to possible DoS of other services running in the same machine.

References (2)

Core 2
Core References
Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2284
Issue Tracking, Patch, Third Party Advisory
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2060

Scores

CVSS v3 5.5
EPSS 0.0003
EPSS Percentile 10.3%
Attack Vector LOCAL
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Details

CWE
CWE-273
Status published
Products (1)
gnome/gnome-shell
Published Apr 29, 2022
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026