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Fencer Intel
medium 5.3

CVE-2018-12615 json

Phusion Passenger incorrect permission assignment

published 8y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-4284-jfhc-f854 , EUVD-2022-2266

cvss
5.3
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.2%
EPSS 1.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 67%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in switchGroup() in agent/ExecHelper/ExecHelperMain.cpp in Phusion Passenger before 5.3.2. The set of groups (gidset) is not set correctly, leaving it up to randomness (i.e., uninitialized memory) which supplementary groups are actually being set while lowering privileges.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems passenger 5.3.2
  • phusion passenger 5.3.2

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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-2018-12615 updated cvss 5.3

passenger: privilege lowering in switchGroup() in agent/ExecHelper/ExecHelperMain.cpp

  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 rubygem-passenger, ruby193-rubygem-passenger
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Satellite 6 mod_passenger, rubygem-passenger, rubygem-passenger-native, rubygem-passenger-native-libs Red Hat Update Infrastructure 3 for Cloud Providers rubygem-passenger
    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

Exploit prediction

1.18% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 67% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 5.3 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N
GitHub 3.0 5.3 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems passenger
<5.3.2
5.3.2

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

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.