CVE-2020-27216
jetty: local temporary directory hijacking vulnerability
Severity
ModerateRed Hat Product Security
CVSS 3.1
Review impact separately from score.
Published · October 22, 2020
Updated · October 12, 2026
Description
In Eclipse Jetty versions 1.0 thru 9.4.32.v20200930, 10.0.0.alpha1 thru 10.0.0.beta2, and 11.0.0.alpha1 thru 11.0.0.beta2O, on Unix like systems, the system's temporary directory is shared between all users on that system. A collocated user can observe the process of creating a temporary sub directory in the shared temporary directory and race to complete the creation of the temporary subdirectory. If the attacker wins the race then they will have read and write permission to the subdirectory used to unpack web applications, including their WEB-INF/lib jar files and JSP files. If any code is ever executed out of this temporary directory, this can lead to a local privilege escalation vulnerability.
Statement
In OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), the Hive/Presto/Hadoop components that comprise the OCP Metering stack, ship the vulnerable version of jetty. Since the release of OCP 4.6, the Metering product has been deprecated [1], hence the affected components are marked as wontfix. This may be fixed in the future.
[1] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.6/release_notes/ocp-4-6-release-notes.html#ocp-4-6-metering-operator-deprecated
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
Jetty users should create temp folders outside the normal /tmp structure, and ensure that their permissions are set so as not to be accessible by an attacker.
CVSS / CWE
CVSS 3.1 · 7CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CWE-377 · Insecure Temporary File