What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-16888

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-01-14 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-250

Description

It was discovered systemd does not correctly check the content of PIDFile files before using it to kill processes. When a service is run from an unprivileged user (e.g. User field set in the service file), a local attacker who is able to write to the PIDFile of the mentioned service may use this flaw to trick systemd into killing other services and/or privileged processes. Versions before v237 are vulnerable.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 19.10
• NetApp Active Iq Performance Analytics Services: all versions
• NetApp Element Software: all versions
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.0
• systemd: before 237 — fixed in 237

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: systemd 237. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2091
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16888
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/5960a34a524848cd722fd7ab7e2227eac10107b0f90d9d1e9c3caa74%40%3Cuser.cassandra.apache.org%3E
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190307-0007/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4269-1/
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2019:2091
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16888
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/5960a34a524848cd722fd7ab7e2227eac10107b0f90d9d1e9c3caa74%40%3Cuser.cassandra.apache.org%3E
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190307-0007/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4269-1/

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