CVE-2010-3435

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2011-01-24 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

The (1) pam_env and (2) pam_mail modules in Linux-PAM (aka pam) before 1.1.2 use root privileges during read access to files and directories that belong to arbitrary user accounts, which might allow local users to obtain sensitive information by leveraging this filesystem activity, as demonstrated by a symlink attack on the .pam_environment file in a user's home directory.

Affected products

Linux-PAM: through 1.1.1; 0.99.1.0, 0.99.2.0, 0.99.2.1, 0.99.3.0, 0.99.4.0, 0.99.5.0 (+16)

References

http://git.altlinux.org/people/ldv/packages/?p=pam.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=06f882f30092a39a1db867c9744b2ca8d60e4ad6
http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2011/000126.html
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/21/3
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/27/10
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/27/4
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/27/5
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/27/7
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/09/27/8
http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2010/10/25/2
http://secunia.com/advisories/49711
http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-201206-31.xml
http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDVSA-2010:220

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