CVE-2005-4890 Privilege escalation in shadow

What is CVE-2005-4890?

CVE-2005-4890 is a high-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 4 Nov 2019. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

There is a possible tty hijacking in shadow 4.x before 4.1.5 and sudo 1.x before 1.7.4 via "su - user -c program". The user session can be escaped to the parent session by using the TIOCSTI ioctl to push characters into the input buffer to be read by the next process.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2005-4890?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Debian Shadow, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Sudo Project Sudo.

How do I fix CVE-2005-4890?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Is CVE-2005-4890 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2005-4890 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2005-4890, GHSA-3p48-pw9r-4325.