CVE-2025-4598

A vulnerability was found in systemd-coredump. This flaw allows an attacker to force a SUID process to crash and replace it with a non-SUID binary to access the original's privileged process coredump, allowing the attacker to read sensitive data, such as /etc/shadow content, loaded by the original process.

A SUID binary or process has a special type of permission, which allows the process to run with the file owner's permissions, regardless of the user executing the binary. This allows the process to access more restricted data than unprivileged users or processes would be able to. An attacker can leverage this flaw by forcing a SUID process to crash and force the Linux kernel to recycle the process PID before systemd-coredump can analyze the /proc/pid/auxv file. If the attacker wins the race condition, they gain access to the original's SUID process coredump file. They can read sensitive content loaded into memory by the original binary, affecting data confidentiality.

This flaw was rated as having a severity of Moderate due to the complexity to exploit this flaw. The attacker needs to setup a way to win the race condition and have an unprivileged local account to successfully exploit this vulnerability.

By default Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 doesn't allow systemd-coredump to create dumps of SUID programs as the /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable is set to 0, disabling by default this capability.

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.

This issue can be mitigated by disabling the capability of the system to generate a coredump for SUID binaries. The perform that, the following command can be ran as root user:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable

While this mitigates this vulnerability while it's not possible to update the systemd package, it disables the capability of analyzing crashes for such binaries.