CVE-2021-35937

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.4 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: yes
Published: 2022-08-25 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-59

Description

A race condition vulnerability was found in rpm. A local unprivileged user could use this flaw to bypass the checks that were introduced in response to CVE-2017-7500 and CVE-2017-7501, potentially gaining root privileges. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

Affected products

Fedoraproject Fedora: 34
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
RPM: before 4.18.0 — fixed in 4.18.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: RPM 4.18.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-35937
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1964125
https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.18.0
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202210-22
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec05/tech/full_papers/borisov/borisov.pdf
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-35937
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1964125
https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.18.0
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202210-22
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec05/tech/full_papers/borisov/borisov.pdf

Get alerted when CVE-2021-35937 or the next vulnerability affects your stack