Two data disclosure flaws have been recognized in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Purple Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, in accordance with the Qualys Risk Analysis Unit (TRU).
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, each vulnerabilities are race situation bugs that might allow an area attacker to acquire entry to entry delicate data. Instruments like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to deal with crash reporting and core dumps in Linux techniques.
“These race situations enable an area attacker to take advantage of a SUID program and achieve learn entry to the ensuing core dump,” Saeed Abbasi, supervisor of product at Qualys TRU, stated.
A quick description of the 2 flaws is beneath –
- CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in Canonical apport bundle as much as and together with 2.32.0 that permits an area attacker to leak delicate data through PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces
- CVE-2025-4598 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in systemd-coredump that permits an attacker to pressure a SUID course of to crash and change it with a non-SUID binary to entry the unique’s privileged course of coredump, permitting the attacker to learn delicate knowledge, reminiscent of /and many others/shadow content material, loaded by the unique course of
SUID, brief for Set Consumer ID, is a particular file permission that permits a consumer to execute a program with the privileges of its proprietor, moderately than their very own permissions.
“When analyzing utility crashes, apport makes an attempt to detect if the crashing course of was working inside a container earlier than performing consistency checks on it,” Canonical’s Octavio Galland stated.
“Which means that if an area attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged course of and rapidly replaces it with one other one with the identical course of ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will try and ahead the core dump (which could comprise delicate data belonging to the unique, privileged course of) into the namespace.”
Purple Hat stated CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Reasonable in severity owing to the excessive complexity in pulling an exploit for the vulnerability, noting that the attacker has to first the race situation and be in possession of an unprivileged native account.
As mitigations, Purple Hat stated customers can run the command “echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” as a root consumer to disable the power of a system to generate a core dump for SUID binaries.
The “/proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” parameter basically controls whether or not SUID packages can produce core dumps on the crash. By setting it to zero, it disables core dumps for all SUID packages and prevents them from being analyzed within the occasion of a crash.
“Whereas this mitigates this vulnerability whereas it is not potential to replace the systemd bundle, it disables the potential of analyzing crashes for such binaries,” Purple Hat stated.
Comparable advisories have been issued by Amazon Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. It is value noting that Debian techniques aren’t inclined to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they do not embody any core dump handler except the systemd-coredump bundle is manually put in. CVE-2025-4598 doesn’t have an effect on Ubuntu releases.
Qualys has additionally developed proof-of-concept (PoC) code for each vulnerabilities, demonstrating how an area attacker can exploit the coredump of a crashed unix_chkpwd course of, which is used to confirm the validity of a consumer’s password, to acquire password hashes from the /and many others/shadow file.
Canonical, in an alert of its personal, stated the influence of CVE-2025-5054 is restricted to the confidentiality of the reminiscence house of invoked SUID executables and that the PoC exploit can leak hashed consumer passwords has restricted real-world influence.
“The exploitation of vulnerabilities in Apport and systemd-coredump can severely compromise the confidentiality at excessive threat, as attackers might extract delicate knowledge, like passwords, encryption keys, or buyer data from core dumps,” Abbasi stated.
“The fallout contains operational downtime, reputational injury, and potential non-compliance with laws. To mitigate these multifaceted dangers successfully, enterprises ought to undertake proactive safety measures by prioritizing patches and mitigations, implementing strong monitoring, and tightening entry controls.”
