CVE-2022-45873

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: none known
Published: 2022-11-23 · updated 2026-10-14
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

systemd 250 and 251 allows local users to achieve a systemd-coredump deadlock by triggering a crash that has a long backtrace. This occurs in parse_elf_object in shared/elf-util.c. The exploitation methodology is to crash a binary calling the same function recursively, and put it in a deeply nested directory to make its backtrace large enough to cause the deadlock. This must be done 16 times when MaxConnections=16 is set for the systemd/units/systemd-coredump.socket file.

Affected products

Fedoraproject Fedora: 36
systemd: from 250 through 251; 252-rc1, 252-rc2

References

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/076b807be472630692c5348c60d0c2b7b28ad437
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/24853#issuecomment-1326561497
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25055#issuecomment-1313733553
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/MS5N5SLYAHKENLAJWYBDKU55ICU3SVZF/
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/076b807be472630692c5348c60d0c2b7b28ad437
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/24853#issuecomment-1326561497
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25055#issuecomment-1313733553
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/MS5N5SLYAHKENLAJWYBDKU55ICU3SVZF/
https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/html/ssa-398330.html

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