What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2017-16997
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 2.9% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2017-12-18 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-426
Description
elf/dl-load.c in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) 2.19 through 2.26 mishandles RPATH and RUNPATH containing $ORIGIN for a privileged (setuid or AT_SECURE) program, which allows local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse library in the current working directory, related to the fillin_rpath and decompose_rpath functions. This is associated with misinterpretion of an empty RPATH/RUNPATH token as the "./" directory. NOTE: this configuration of RPATH/RUNPATH for a privileged program is apparently very uncommon; most likely, no such program is shipped with any common Linux distribution.
Affected products
- GNU C Library (glibc): 2.19, 2.20, 2.21, 2.22, 2.23, 2.25 (+1)
- RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 7.0
- RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 7.0
- RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 7.0
References
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/102228
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2019:0327
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3092
- https://bugs.debian.org/884615
- https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22625
- https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-12/msg00528.html
- http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/102228
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2019:0327
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3092
- https://bugs.debian.org/884615
- https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22625
- https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-12/msg00528.html
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