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Fencer Intel
medium 6.4

CVE-2025-57851 json

Mce: privilege escalation via excessive /etc/passwd permissions

published 7mo ago modified 3mo ago also EUVD-2025-209300

cvss
6.4
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 1%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A container privilege escalation flaw was found in certain Multicluster Engine for Kubernetes images. This issue stems from the /etc/passwd file being created with group-writable permissions during build time. In certain conditions, an attacker who can execute commands within an affected container, even as a non-root user, can leverage their membership in the root group to modify the /etc/passwd file. This could allow the attacker to add a new user with any arbitrary UID, including UID 0, leading to full root privileges within the container.

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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-2025-57851 updated cvss 6.4

mce: privilege escalation via excessive /etc/passwd permissions

  • Red Hat Multicluster Engine for Kubernetes multicluster-engine/agent-service-rhel8, multicluster-engine/assisted-service-8-rhel8, multicluster-engine/assisted-service-9-rhel9
    affected: no fix available, no fix planned “Will not fix”

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
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
7mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.12% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 1% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 6.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 6.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected products

  • Red Hat Multicluster Engine for Kubernetes

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-276 Incorrect Default Permissions

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.