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CVE-2018-4180

cups: Local privilege escalation to root due to insecure environment variable handling

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Severity

Low

Red Hat Product Security

6.7

CVSS 3.0

Review impact separately from score.

Published · May 9, 2018

Updated · November 22, 2025

Description

It was discovered that CUPS allows non-root users to pass environment variables to CUPS backends. Affected backends use attacker-controlled environment variables without proper sanitization. A local attacker, who is part of one of the groups specified in the SystemGroups directive, could use the cupsctl binary to set SetEnv and PassEnv directives and potentially controls the flow of the affected backend, resulting in some cases in arbitrary code execution with root privileges.

CVSS score applicability

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

Mitigation

Do not add untrusted users to sys and root groups.

CVSS / CWE

CVSS 3.0 · 6.7
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CWE-642 · External Control of Critical State Data