What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-12424

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2017-08-04 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

In shadow before 4.5, the newusers tool could be made to manipulate internal data structures in ways unintended by the authors. Malformed input may lead to crashes (with a buffer overflow or other memory corruption) or other unspecified behaviors. This crosses a privilege boundary in, for example, certain web-hosting environments in which a Control Panel allows an unprivileged user account to create subaccounts.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0
• Shadow Project Shadow: before 4.5 — fixed in 4.5

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Shadow Project Shadow 4.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756630
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1266675
• https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/commit/954e3d2e7113e9ac06632aee3c69b8d818cc8952
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00020.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201710-16
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756630
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1266675
• https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/commit/954e3d2e7113e9ac06632aee3c69b8d818cc8952
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00020.html
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201710-16

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