What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-57850: Codeready-ws: privilege escalation via excessive /etc/passwd permissions

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.4 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-12-02 · updated 2026-10-18
• Weakness: CWE-276

Description

A container privilege escalation flaw was found in certain CodeReady Workspaces images. This issue stems from the /etc/passwd file being created with group-writable permissions during build time. In certain conditions, an attacker who can execute commands within an affected container, even as a non-root user, can leverage their membership in the root group to modify the /etc/passwd file. This could allow the attacker to add a new user with any arbitrary UID, including UID 0, leading to full root privileges within the container.

Affected products

• Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces: all versions

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-57850
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2391103

Get alerted when CVE-2025-57850 or the next vulnerability affects your stack