What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2015-3246: Red Hat Libuser Race Condition Vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2026-08-26
• EPSS: 8.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2015-08-11 · updated 2026-10-02
• Weakness: CWE-264

Description

libuser before 0.56.13-8 and 0.60 before 0.60-7, as used in the userhelper program in the usermode package, directly modifies /etc/passwd, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (inconsistent file state) by causing an error during the modification. NOTE: this issue can be combined with CVE-2015-3245 to gain privileges.

Affected products

• Libuser Project Libuser: before 0.56.13-8; from 0.60 before 0.60-7 — fixed in 0.56.13-8, 0.60-7
• Opensuse: 13.2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 5.0, 6.0, 7.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Libuser Project Libuser 0.56.13-8, 0.60-7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2015-August/163044.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2015-July/162947.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2015-08/msg00000.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-1482.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2015-1483.html
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/76022
• http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1033040
• https://access.redhat.com/articles/1537873
• https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/44633/
• https://www.qualys.com/2015/07/23/cve-2015-3245-cve-2015-3246/cve-2015-3245-cve-2015-3246.txt
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2015-August/163044.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2015-July/162947.html

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