CVE-2025-49809

A possible privilege escalation flaw was found in the MTR networking tool. This issue occurs in rare cases when the package is configured to run with sudo rules instead of setuid and stems from its improper handling in the execution of a program specified by the MTR_PACKET environment variable.

The condition to exploit this vulnerability is not the default behavior on Linux systems and should rarely occur.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), mtr does not rely on sudo or setuid for privilege elevation. Instead, RHEL uses file system capabilities (cap_net_raw+ep) on the mtr-packet binary to grant the necessary privileges securely without requiring full root access. As a result, the vulnerable execution path (such as /etc/mtr.is.run.under.sudo) is not used in RHEL, rendering the exploit path non-functional in this environment. There is no need for custom sudo rules for mtr, which is the only configuration impacted by the reported issue.

For more details see discussion upstream, https://github.com/traviscross/mtr/issues/541.

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.

No mitigation is currently available that meets Red Hat Product Security’s standards for usability, deployment, applicability, or stability.