CVE-2021-23239

Description

A flaw was found in sudoedit. A race condition vulnerability and improper symbolic link resolution could be used by a local unprivileged user to test for the existence of directories and files not normally accessible to the user. This flaw cannot be used to read the content or write to arbitrary files on the file system. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality.

Statement

This flaw has been rated as having a security impact of Low. The symbolic link protection is enabled by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8, preventing this issue from being exploited.

Mitigation

Enabling the symbolic link protection (/proc/sys/fs/protected_symlinks set to 1) is sufficient to mitigate this flaw.

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details

Info alert:Important note

CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).

CVSS v3 Score Breakdown

Red HatNVDcve.org
Base Score2.52.5N/A
Attack VectorLocalLocalN/A
Attack ComplexityHighHighN/A
Privileges RequiredLowLowN/A
User InteractionNoneNoneN/A
ScopeUnchangedUnchangedN/A
ConfidentialityLowLowN/A
Integrity ImpactNoneNoneN/A
Availability ImpactNoneNoneN/A

Vector

Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N

Understanding the Weakness (CWE)

Integrity,Other

Technical Impact: Alter Execution Logic; Unexpected State

The attacker can gain access to otherwise unauthorized resources.

Integrity,Other

Technical Impact: Modify Application Data; Modify Files or Directories; Modify Memory; Other

Race conditions such as this kind may be employed to gain read or write access to resources which are not normally readable or writable by the user in question.

Integrity,Other

Technical Impact: Other

The resource in question, or other resources (through the corrupted one), may be changed in undesirable ways by a malicious user.

Non-Repudiation

Technical Impact: Hide Activities

If a file or other resource is written in this method, as opposed to in a valid way, logging of the activity may not occur.

Non-Repudiation,Other

Technical Impact: Other

In some cases it may be possible to delete files a malicious user might not otherwise have access to, such as log files.

Other

Technical Impact: Unexpected State

The product may perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state.

Frequently Asked Questions

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