CVE-2023-40303

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: 2023-08-14 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-252

Description

GNU inetutils before 2.5 may allow privilege escalation because of unchecked return values of set*id() family functions in ftpd, rcp, rlogin, rsh, rshd, and uucpd. This is, for example, relevant if the setuid system call fails when a process is trying to drop privileges before letting an ordinary user control the activities of the process.

Affected products

GNU inetutils: through 2.4

References

http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/12/30/4
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/inetutils/
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/commit/?id=e4e65c03f4c11292a3e40ef72ca3f194c8bffdd6
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/10/msg00013.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/10/msg00013.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/10/msg00013.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/10/msg00013.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2023-07/msg00000.html
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/12/30/4
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/inetutils/
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/commit/?id=e4e65c03f4c11292a3e40ef72ca3f194c8bffdd6
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2023/10/msg00013.html

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