CVE-2019-12522

A flaw was found in squid. When Squid is run as root, it spawns its child processes as a lesser user, by default the user nobody. This is done via the leave_suid call. leave_suid leaves the Saved UID as 0. This makes it trivial for an attacker who has compromised the child process to escalate their privileges back to root. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

This issue is not a big problem on its own, as it requires another remote code execution vulnerability or that a local user has the privileges to modify the squid processes to be exploited. Thus, it is actually closer to a security enhancement than a vulnerability.

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.