What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-1196

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2018-03-19 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-59

Description

Spring Boot supports an embedded launch script that can be used to easily run the application as a systemd or init.d linux service. The script included with Spring Boot 1.5.9 and earlier and 2.0.0.M1 through 2.0.0.M7 is susceptible to a symlink attack which allows the "run_user" to overwrite and take ownership of any file on the same system. In order to instigate the attack, the application must be installed as a service and the "run_user" requires shell access to the server. Spring Boot application that are not installed as a service, or are not using the embedded launch script are not susceptible.

Affected products

• Spring Boot: through 1.5.9; 2.0.0-milestone1, 2.0.0-milestone2, 2.0.0-milestone3, 2.0.0-milestone4, 2.0.0-milestone5, 2.0.0-milestone6 (+1)
• Spring Boot: from 1.5.0 through 1.5.9; from 2.0.0.M1 through 2.0.0.M7

References

• https://pivotal.io/security/cve-2018-1196
• https://pivotal.io/security/cve-2018-1196

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