CVE-2019-19882

Publication date 18 December 2019

Last updated 24 July 2024

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

shadow 4.8, in certain circumstances affecting at least Gentoo, Arch Linux, and Void Linux, allows local users to obtain root access because setuid programs are misconfigured. Specifically, this affects shadow 4.8 when compiled using --with-libpam but without explicitly passing --disable-account-tools-setuid, and without a PAM configuration suitable for use with setuid account management tools. This combination leads to account management tools (groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, useradd, userdel, usermod) that can easily be used by unprivileged local users to escalate privileges to root in multiple ways. This issue became much more relevant in approximately December 2019 when an unrelated bug was fixed (i.e., the chmod calls to suidusbins were fixed in the upstream Makefile which is now included in the release version 4.8).

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
shadow	19.10 eoan	Not affected
	19.04 disco	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not affected
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not affected

Notes

mdeslaur

In Debian and Ubuntu, shadow is compiled with --disable-account-tools-setuid, so this vulnerability is not present

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
shadow	Upstream: edf7547

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.8 · High
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	Low
User interaction	None
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H