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Two info disclosure flaws have been recognized in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, in keeping with the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU).
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, each vulnerabilities are race situation bugs that would allow a neighborhood attacker to acquire entry to entry delicate info. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to deal with crash reporting and core dumps in Linux programs.
“These race circumstances permit a neighborhood attacker to use a SUID program and acquire learn entry to the ensuing core dump,” Saeed Abbasi, supervisor of product at Qualys TRU, mentioned.
A quick description of the 2 flaws is under –
- CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in Canonical apport bundle as much as and together with 2.32.0 that enables a neighborhood attacker to leak delicate info by way of PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces
- CVE-2025-4598 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in systemd-coredump that enables an attacker to pressure a SUID course of to crash and exchange it with a non-SUID binary to entry the unique’s privileged course of coredump, permitting the attacker to learn delicate knowledge, akin to /and so on/shadow content material, loaded by the unique course of
SUID, brief for Set User ID, is a particular file permission that enables a consumer to execute a program with the privileges of its proprietor, fairly than their very own permissions.
“When analyzing software 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 mentioned.
“This implies that if a neighborhood attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged course of and shortly replaces it with one other one with the identical course of ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will try to ahead the core dump (which could include delicate info belonging to the unique, privileged course of) into the namespace.”
Red Hat mentioned CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Moderate in severity owing to the excessive complexity in pulling an exploit for the vulnerability, noting that the attacker has to first win the race situation and be in possession of an unprivileged native account.
As mitigations, Red Hat mentioned 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 following a 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.
“While this mitigates this vulnerability whereas it isn’t attainable to replace the systemd bundle, it disables the aptitude of analyzing crashes for such binaries,” Red Hat mentioned.
Similar advisories have been issued by Amazon Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. It’s price noting that Debian programs aren’t inclined to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they do not embrace 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 a neighborhood 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 so on/shadow file.
Canonical, in an alert of its personal, mentioned the impression of CVE-2025-5054 is restricted to the confidentiality of the reminiscence area of invoked SUID executables and that the PoC exploit can leak hashed consumer passwords has restricted real-world impression.
“The exploitation of vulnerabilities in Apport and systemd-coredump can severely compromise the confidentiality at excessive danger, as attackers may extract delicate knowledge, like passwords, encryption keys, or buyer info from core dumps,” Abbasi mentioned.
“The fallout contains operational downtime, reputational harm, 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.”