CVE-2008-5983 Path traversal in n/a

What is CVE-2008-5983?

CVE-2008-5983 is a medium-severity path traversal vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 28 Jan 2009. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Untrusted search path vulnerability in the PySys_SetArgv API function in Python 2.6 and earlier, and possibly later versions, prepends an empty string to sys.path when the argv[0] argument does not contain a path separator, which might allow local users to execute arbitrary code via a Trojan horse Python file in the current working directory.

Weakness: CWE-426

Which versions are affected by CVE-2008-5983?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Fedoraproject Fedora, Python Python.

How do I fix CVE-2008-5983?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2008-5983 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2008-5983 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as AZL-109584, GHSA-4jhg-wfq8-3vgm.