Privilege Escalation Affecting shadow-maint/shadow package, versions [,4.5)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.04% (6th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-SHADOWMAINTSHADOW-2365863
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed17 Mar 2021
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 17 Mar 2021

CVE-2017-20002  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-269  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade shadow-maint/shadow to version 4.5 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Privilege Escalation. The Debian shadow package Shadow incorrectly lists pts/0 and pts/1 as physical terminals in /etc/securetty. This allows local users to login as password-less users even if they are connected by non-physical means such as SSH (hence bypassing PAM's nullok_secure configuration). This notably affects environments such as virtual machines automatically generated with a default blank root password, allowing all local users to escalate privileges.

References

CVSS Scores

version 3.1