What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-35938

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% 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 symbolic link issue was found in rpm. It occurs when rpm sets the desired permissions and credentials after installing a file. A local unprivileged user could use this flaw to exchange the original file with a symbolic link to a security-critical file and escalate their privileges on the system. 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: 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-2021-35938
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1964114
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157880
• https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/commit/25a435e90844ea98fe5eb7bef22c1aecf3a9c033
• https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/1919
• https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.18.0
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202210-22
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-35938
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1964114
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1157880
• https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/commit/25a435e90844ea98fe5eb7bef22c1aecf3a9c033
• https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/1919

Get alerted when CVE-2021-35938 or the next vulnerability affects your stack