Privilege Escalation Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [3.16,3.16.71)[4.4,4.4.185)[4.9,4.9.185)[4.10,4.14.133)[4.19,4.19.58)[5.1,5.1.17)


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

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

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Attacked
EPSS
83.58% (100th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-3005534
  • published26 Jan 2022
  • disclosed17 Jul 2019
  • creditUnknown

Introduced: 17 Jul 2019

CVE-2019-13272  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-269  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 3.16.71, 4.4.185, 4.9.185, 4.14.133, 4.19.58, 5.1.17 or higher.

Overview

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Privilege Escalation. In the Linux kernel before 5.1.17, ptrace_link in kernel/ptrace.c mishandles the recording of the credentials of a process that wants to create a ptrace relationship, which allows local users to obtain root access by leveraging certain scenarios with a parent-child process relationship, where a parent drops privileges and calls execve (potentially allowing control by an attacker). One contributing factor is an object lifetime issue (which can also cause a panic). Another contributing factor is incorrect marking of a ptrace relationship as privileged, which is exploitable through (for example) Polkit's pkexec helper with PTRACE_TRACEME. NOTE: SELinux deny_ptrace might be a usable workaround in some environments.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1