CVE-2019-25017

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.9 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2021-02-02 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-863

Description

An issue was discovered in rcp in MIT krb5-appl through 1.0.3. Due to the rcp implementation being derived from 1983 rcp, the server chooses which files/directories are sent to the client. However, the rcp client only performs cursory validation of the object name returned (only directory traversal attacks are prevented). A malicious rcp server (or Man-in-The-Middle attacker) can overwrite arbitrary files in the rcp client target directory. If recursive operation (-r) is performed, the server can manipulate subdirectories as well (for example, to overwrite the .ssh/authorized_keys file). This issue is similar to CVE-2019-6111 and CVE-2019-7283. NOTE: MIT krb5-appl is not supported upstream but is shipped by a few Linux distributions. The affected code was removed from the supported MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) product many years ago, at version 1.8.

Affected products

MIT Krb5-Appl: through 1.0.3

References

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