CVE-2014-7272

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
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: 2018-03-08 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-264

Description

Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) before 0.10.0 allows local users to gain root privileges because code running as root performs write operations within a user home directory, and this user may have created links in advance (exploitation requires the user to win a race condition in the ~/.Xauthority chown case, but not other cases).

Affected products

Fedoraproject Fedora: 20, 21
Sddm Project Sddm: before 0.10.0 — fixed in 0.10.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Sddm Project Sddm 0.10.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2014-October/141494.html
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2014-October/141550.html
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/10/06/4
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1149610
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/pull/280
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2014-October/141494.html
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2014-October/141550.html
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/10/06/4
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1149610
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/pull/280

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