Description

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.

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2025-4598

CVSS Base Severity: MEDIUM

CVSS Base Score: 4.7

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Affected Products

Vendor: Red Hat

Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.01% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 0.99% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-06-16 (when was this score calculated)

Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC)

SSVC Exploitation: poc

SSVC Technical Impact: partial

SSVC Automatable: false

References

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-4598
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-4598
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2369242
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/05/29/3

Timeline