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MEDIUM

shadow-utils: newgidmap allows unprivileged user to drop supplementary groups potentially allowing privilege escalation

Published Feb 15, 2018

Description

An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5. newgidmap (in shadow-utils) is setuid and allows an unprivileged user to be placed in a user namespace where setgroups(2) is permitted. This allows an attacker to remove themselves from a supplementary group, which may allow access to certain filesystem paths if the administrator has used "group blacklisting" (e.g., chmod g-rwx) to restrict access to paths. This flaw effectively reverts a security feature in the kernel (in particular, the /proc/self/setgroups knob) to prevent this sort of privilege escalation.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

This issue did not affect the versions of shadow-utils as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 and 7 as they did not provide newgidmap program.

Metrics

References (6)

Change history (0)

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Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published Feb 15, 2018
Updated Aug 5, 2024
Reserved Feb 15, 2018
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Moderate
Public date Nov 14, 2017