What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-17188

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-01-02 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

Prior to CouchDB version 2.3.0, CouchDB allowed for runtime-configuration of key components of the database. In some cases, this lead to vulnerabilities where CouchDB admin users could access the underlying operating system as the CouchDB user. Together with other vulnerabilities, it allowed full system entry for unauthenticated users. Rather than waiting for new vulnerabilities to be discovered, and fixing them as they come up, the CouchDB development team decided to make changes to avoid this entire class of vulnerabilities.

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache CouchDB: before 2.3.0 — fixed in 2.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Software Foundation Apache CouchDB 2.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://blog.couchdb.org/2018/12/17/cve-2018-17188/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/S5FPHVVU5KMRFKQTJPAM3TBGC7LKCWQS/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/X3JOUCX7LHDV4YWZDQNXT5NTKKRANZQW/
• https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-hpesbmu03935en_us
• https://blog.couchdb.org/2018/12/17/cve-2018-17188/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/S5FPHVVU5KMRFKQTJPAM3TBGC7LKCWQS/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/X3JOUCX7LHDV4YWZDQNXT5NTKKRANZQW/
• https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-hpesbmu03935en_us

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