What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-16355

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
• 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: 2017-12-14 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

In agent/Core/SpawningKit/Spawner.h in Phusion Passenger 5.1.10 (fixed in Passenger Open Source 5.1.11 and Passenger Enterprise 5.1.10), if Passenger is running as root, it is possible to list the contents of arbitrary files on a system by symlinking a file named REVISION from the application root folder to a file of choice and querying passenger-status --show=xml.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0
• Phusion Passenger: from 5.0.10 before 5.1.10; from 5.0.10 before 5.1.11 — fixed in 5.1.10, 5.1.11

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Phusion Passenger 5.1.10, 5.1.11. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://blog.phusion.nl/2017/10/13/passenger-security-advisory-5-1-11/
• https://github.com/phusion/passenger/commit/4043718264095cde6623c2cbe8c644541036d7bf
• https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Mar/34
• https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4415
• https://blog.phusion.nl/2017/10/13/passenger-security-advisory-5-1-11/
• https://github.com/phusion/passenger/commit/4043718264095cde6623c2cbe8c644541036d7bf
• https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2019/Mar/34
• https://www.debian.org/security/2019/dsa-4415

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