What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-7169
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.0)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 1.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2018-02-15 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-732
Description
An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5. newgidmap (in shadow-utils) is setuid and allows an unprivileged user to be placed in a user namespace where setgroups(2) is permitted. This allows an attacker to remove themselves from a supplementary group, which may allow access to certain filesystem paths if the administrator has used "group blacklisting" (e.g., chmod g-rwx) to restrict access to paths. This flaw effectively reverts a security feature in the kernel (in particular, the /proc/self/setgroups knob) to prevent this sort of privilege escalation.
Affected products
References
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1729357
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201805-09
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1729357
- https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201805-09
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