CVE-2021-35938 Privilege escalation in RPM

What is CVE-2021-35938?

CVE-2021-35938 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Fedoraproject Fedora, published on 25 Aug 2022. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A symbolic link issue was found in rpm. It occurs when rpm sets the desired permissions and credentials after installing a file. A local unprivileged user could use this flaw to exchange the original file with a symbolic link to a security-critical file and escalate their privileges on the system. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

Weakness: CWE-59

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-35938?

It affects 3 products.

Products include Fedoraproject Fedora, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Rpm Rpm.

How do I fix CVE-2021-35938?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2021-35938 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-35938 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Fedoraproject Fedora

• CVE-2024-4577 PHP-CGI OS Command Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2021-39226 Grafana Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-5544 VMware ESXi and Horizon DaaS OpenSLP Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-4947 Google Chromium V8 Type Confusion Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2024-4671 Google Chromium Visuals Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.6

All Fedoraproject Fedora vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as AZL-10723, CLSA-2023-1673906443, CLSA-2023-1674164204, DEBIAN-CVE-2021-35938, GHSA-83gm-5269-qr3v, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-35938.