What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-17087

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2017-12-01 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-668

Description

fileio.c in Vim prior to 8.0.1263 sets the group ownership of a .swp file to the editor's primary group (which may be different from the group ownership of the original file), which allows local users to obtain sensitive information by leveraging an applicable group membership, as demonstrated by /etc/shadow owned by root:shadow mode 0640, but /etc/.shadow.swp owned by root:users mode 0640, a different vulnerability than CVE-2017-1000382.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04
• Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0
• vim/vim: before 8.0.1263 — fixed in 8.0.1263

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: vim/vim 8.0.1263. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/27/2
• http://security.cucumberlinux.com/security/details.php?id=166
• https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/5a73e0ca54c77e067c3b12ea6f35e3e8681e8cf8
• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/sRT9BtjLWMk/BRtSXNU4BwAJ
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/08/msg00003.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/01/msg00003.html
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4582-1/
• http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/11/27/2
• http://security.cucumberlinux.com/security/details.php?id=166
• https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/5a73e0ca54c77e067c3b12ea6f35e3e8681e8cf8
• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/sRT9BtjLWMk/BRtSXNU4BwAJ
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/08/msg00003.html

Get alerted when CVE-2017-17087 or the next vulnerability affects your stack