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Fencer Intel
high 7.8

CVE-2018-16588 json

Privilege escalation can occur in the SUSE useradd.c code in useradd, as distributed in the SUSE shadow package through 4.2.1-27.9.1 for SU…

published 8y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2018-8395

cvss
7.8
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 22%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Privilege escalation can occur in the SUSE useradd.c code in useradd, as distributed in the SUSE shadow package through 4.2.1-27.9.1 for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SLE-12) and through 4.5-5.39 for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (SLE-15). Non-existing intermediate directories are created with mode 0777 during user creation. Given that they are world-writable, local attackers might use this for privilege escalation and other unspecified attacks. NOTE: this would affect non-SUSE users who took useradd.c code from a 2014-04-02 upstream pull request; however, no non-SUSE distribution is known to be affected.

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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-2018-16588 updated cvss 4.4

shadow-utils: useradd-mkdirs.patch creates intermediate directories with 0777

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 shadow-utils, shadow-utils-subid Red Hat Virtualization 4 shadow-utils
    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

0.30% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 22% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.0 7.8 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.6 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

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.