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Fencer Intel
high 7.1

CVE-2017-18018 json

In GNU Coreutils through 8.29, chown-core.c in chown and chgrp does not prevent replacement of a plain file with a symlink during use of th…

published 2018-01-04 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2017-9158

cvss
7.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 28%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In GNU Coreutils through 8.29, chown-core.c in chown and chgrp does not prevent replacement of a plain file with a symlink during use of the POSIX "-R -L" options, which allows local users to modify the ownership of arbitrary files by leveraging a race condition.

Patch / fix

  • coreutils Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +13 more 8.30-r0
  • coreutils Alpine 3.7 8.28-r0
  • coreutils Alpine 3.8 8.29-r2

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2017-18018

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2017-18018 updated cvss 4.2

coreutils: race condition vulnerability in chown and chgrp

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 coreutils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 coreutils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 coreutils, coreutils-libs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 coreutils
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 coreutils, coreutils-common, coreutils-single
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
17 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.34% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 28% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • lists.gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2017-12/msg00045.html referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CISA ADP 3.1 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
CNA 3.1 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
NVD 3.0 4.7 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
NVD 2.0 1.9 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.