What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2023-4001: Grub2: bypass the grub password protection feature
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 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: none known
- Published: 2024-01-15 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-290
Description
An authentication bypass flaw was found in GRUB due to the way that GRUB uses the UUID of a device to search for the configuration file that contains the password hash for the GRUB password protection feature. An attacker capable of attaching an external drive such as a USB stick containing a file system with a duplicate UUID (the same as in the "/boot/" file system) can bypass the GRUB password protection feature on UEFI systems, which enumerate removable drives before non-removable ones. This issue was introduced in a downstream patch in Red Hat's version of grub2 and does not affect the upstream package.
Affected products
- Fedoraproject Fedora: 38, 39
- grub2: all versions
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 9.0
References
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0437
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0456
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0468
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-4001
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2224951
- https://dfir.ru/2024/01/15/cve-2023-4001-a-vulnerability-in-the-downstream-grub-boot-manager/
- http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/01/15/3
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0437
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0456
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0468
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2023-4001
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2224951
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