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Fencer Intel
medium 5.3

CVE-2018-7169 json

An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5.

published 8y ago modified 4mo ago also EUVD-2018-18911

cvss
5.3
version 3.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 75%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5. newgidmap (in shadow-utils) is setuid and allows an unprivileged user to be placed in a user namespace where setgroups(2) is permitted. This allows an attacker to remove themselves from a supplementary group, which may allow access to certain filesystem paths if the administrator has used "group blacklisting" (e.g., chmod g-rwx) to restrict access to paths. This flaw effectively reverts a security feature in the kernel (in particular, the /proc/self/setgroups knob) to prevent this sort of privilege escalation.

Patch / fix

  • shadow Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:4.7-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2018-7169

  • shadow Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 1:4.5-1ubuntu2.2
  • shadow Ubuntu Pro 14.04 LTS 1:4.1.5.1-1ubuntu9.5+esm1
  • shadow Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 1:4.2-3.1ubuntu5.5+esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2018-7169

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • shadow SLES for SAP 12 SP3, SLES for SAP 12 SP2, SLES for Raspberry Pi 12 SP2 +4 more 4.2.1-27.6.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:0662-1

  • shadow openSUSE Tumbleweed 4.9-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:11378-1

Is CVE-2018-7169 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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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-2018-7169 updated cvss 4.4

shadow-utils: newgidmap allows unprivileged user to drop supplementary groups potentially allowing privilege escalation

  • 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
    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

1.57% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 75% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

Exploits and checks

  • bugs.launchpad.net https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1729357 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

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:L/I:N/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

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.