Two info disclosure flaws have been recognized in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Crimson Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, in keeping with the Qualys Menace Analysis Unit (TRU).
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, each vulnerabilities are race situation bugs that might allow a neighborhood attacker to acquire entry to entry delicate info. Instruments like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to deal with crash reporting and core dumps in Linux methods.
“These race circumstances permit a neighborhood attacker to use a SUID program and acquire learn entry to the ensuing core dump,” Saeed Abbasi, supervisor of product at Qualys TRU, mentioned.
A short description of the 2 flaws is under –
- CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in Canonical apport bundle as much as and together with 2.32.0 that enables a neighborhood attacker to leak delicate info through PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces
- CVE-2025-4598 (CVSS rating: 4.7) – A race situation in systemd-coredump that enables an attacker to power a SUID course of to crash and substitute it with a non-SUID binary to entry the unique’s privileged course of coredump, permitting the attacker to learn delicate knowledge, akin to /and so forth/shadow content material, loaded by the unique course of
SUID, quick for Set Consumer ID, is a particular file permission that enables a person to execute a program with the privileges of its proprietor, moderately than their very own permissions.
“When analyzing utility crashes, apport makes an attempt to detect if the crashing course of was working inside a container earlier than performing consistency checks on it,” Canonical’s Octavio Galland mentioned.
“Because of this if a neighborhood attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged course of and rapidly replaces it with one other one with the identical course of ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will try and ahead the core dump (which could include delicate info belonging to the unique, privileged course of) into the namespace.”
Crimson Hat mentioned CVE-2025-4598 has been rated Reasonable in severity owing to the excessive complexity in pulling an exploit for the vulnerability, noting that the attacker has to first win the race situation and be in possession of an unprivileged native account.
As mitigations, Crimson Hat mentioned customers can run the command “echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” as a root person to disable the flexibility of a system to generate a core dump for SUID binaries.
The “/proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” parameter basically controls whether or not SUID packages can produce core dumps following a crash. By setting it to zero, it disables core dumps for all SUID packages and prevents them from being analyzed within the occasion of a crash.
“Whereas this mitigates this vulnerability whereas it is not potential to replace the systemd bundle, it disables the aptitude of analyzing crashes for such binaries,” Crimson Hat mentioned.
Comparable advisories have been issued by Amazon Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. It is price noting that Debian methods aren’t prone to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they do not embrace any core dump handler until the systemd-coredump bundle is manually put in. CVE-2025-4598 doesn’t have an effect on Ubuntu releases.
Qualys has additionally developed proof-of-concept (PoC) code for each vulnerabilities, demonstrating how a neighborhood attacker can exploit the coredump of a crashed unix_chkpwd course of, which is used to confirm the validity of a person’s password, to acquire password hashes from the /and so forth/shadow file.
Canonical, in an alert of its personal, mentioned the affect of CVE-2025-5054 is restricted to the confidentiality of the reminiscence area of invoked SUID executables and that the PoC exploit can leak hashed person passwords has restricted real-world affect.
“The exploitation of vulnerabilities in Apport and systemd-coredump can severely compromise the confidentiality at excessive danger, as attackers might extract delicate knowledge, like passwords, encryption keys, or buyer info from core dumps,” Abbasi mentioned.
“The fallout contains operational downtime, reputational injury, and potential non-compliance with laws. To mitigate these multifaceted dangers successfully, enterprises ought to undertake proactive safety measures by prioritizing patches and mitigations, implementing strong monitoring, and tightening entry controls.”
