Two data disclosure flaws have been recognized in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Pink Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, in line with the Qualys Menace Analysis Unit (TRU).
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, each vulnerabilities are race situation bugs that would 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 permit an area 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 beneath –
- CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in Canonical apport package deal 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 power 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, similar to /and so on/shadow content material, loaded by the unique course of
SUID, quick for Set Person 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 operating inside a container earlier than performing consistency checks on it,” Canonical’s Octavio Galland mentioned.
“Which means that if an area 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 and ahead the core dump (which could include delicate data belonging to the unique, privileged course of) into the namespace.”
Pink Hat mentioned CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Average 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, Pink 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 primarily 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 attainable to replace the systemd package deal, it disables the potential of analyzing crashes for such binaries,” Pink Hat mentioned.
Related advisories have been issued by Amazon Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. It is price noting that Debian techniques aren’t prone to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they do not embrace any core dump handler until the systemd-coredump package deal 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 so on/shadow file.
Canonical, in an alert of its personal, mentioned the affect 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 affect.
“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 mentioned.
“The fallout consists of 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.”
