CVE-2013-4559 Privilege escalation in n/a

What is CVE-2013-4559?

CVE-2013-4559 is a high-severity vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 19 Nov 2013. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

lighttpd before 1.4.33 does not check the return value of the (1) setuid, (2) setgid, or (3) setgroups functions, which might cause lighttpd to run as root if it is restarted and allows remote attackers to gain privileges, as demonstrated by multiple calls to the clone function that cause setuid to fail when the user process limit is reached.

Weakness: CWE-264

Which versions are affected by CVE-2013-4559?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Lighttpd Lighttpd, Opensuse Opensuse.

How do I fix CVE-2013-4559?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Is CVE-2013-4559 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2013-4559 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-2013-4559, GHSA-pfcc-94ff-p2cv.