CVE-2020-7221 Privilege escalation in n/a

What is CVE-2020-7221?

CVE-2020-7221 is a high-severity vulnerability in Mariadb Mariadb, published on 4 Feb 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

mysql_install_db in MariaDB 10.4.7 through 10.4.11 allows privilege escalation from the mysql user account to root because chown and chmod are performed unsafely, as demonstrated by a symlink attack on a chmod 04755 of auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool. NOTE: this does not affect the Oracle MySQL product, which implements mysql_install_db differently.

Weakness: CWE-59

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-7221?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including mariadb, mariadb-min and mysql-client. It affects 1 product.

Products include Mariadb Mariadb.

How do I fix CVE-2020-7221?

Upgrade mariadb to 10.4.12 or later.

Is CVE-2020-7221 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-7221 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Mariadb Mariadb

• CVE-2026-49261 MariaDB server has unsafe parameter handling in `wsrep_notify_cmd` Critical 10.0
• CVE-2026-85746 MariaDB: Out-of-bound buffer write on in `ST_AsText` of nested GeometryCollections Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-85748 MariaDB: Use-after-free with a large number of SYS_REFCURSOR's Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-92262 MariaDB: Numerous issues caused by historical #mysql50# tablename encoding bypass. Critical 9.9
• CVE-2023-26785 Code injection in n/a Critical 9.8

All Mariadb Mariadb vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as BIT-mariadb-2020-7221, BIT-mariadb-min-2020-7221, BIT-mysql-client-2020-7221, GHSA-3xr8-q83f-2wqp, UBUNTU-CVE-2020-7221.