CVE-2023-1521: Local Privilege Escalation in sccache

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2024-11-26 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-426

Description

On Linux the sccache client can execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local sccache server, by preloading the code in a shared library passed to LD_PRELOAD. If the server is run as root (which is the default when installing the snap package https://snapcraft.io/sccache ), this means a user running the sccache client can get root privileges.

Affected products

Mozilla sccache: before 0.4.0 — fixed in 0.4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Mozilla sccache 0.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-x7fr-pg8f-93f5
https://securitylab.github.com/advisories/GHSL-2023-046_ScCache

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