Two data disclosure flaws have been recognized in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Purple Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, based on the Qualys Menace Analysis Unit (TRU).
Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, each vulnerabilities are race situation bugs that would allow an area attacker to acquire entry to entry delicate data. Instruments like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to deal with crash reporting and core dumps in Linux programs.
“These race situations enable an area attacker to use a SUID program and achieve 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 package deal as much as and together with 2.32.0 that enables an area attacker to leak delicate data 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 information, resembling /and so on/shadow content material, loaded by the unique course of
SUID, quick for Set Person ID, is a particular file permission that enables a consumer to execute a program with the privileges of its proprietor, fairly 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.
“Which means that if an area attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged course of and shortly replaces it with one other one with the identical course of ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will try to ahead the core dump (which could include delicate data belonging to the unique, privileged course of) into the namespace.”
Purple 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 the race situation and be in possession of an unprivileged native account.
As mitigations, Purple Hat mentioned customers can run the command “echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” as a root consumer to disable the flexibility of a system to generate a core dump for SUID binaries.
The “/proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable” parameter primarily controls whether or not SUID applications can produce core dumps on the crash. By setting it to zero, it disables core dumps for all SUID applications and prevents them from being analyzed within the occasion of a crash.
“Whereas this mitigates this vulnerability whereas it isn’t doable to replace the systemd package deal, it disables the aptitude of analyzing crashes for such binaries,” Purple Hat mentioned.
Related advisories have been issued by Amazon Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. It is value noting that Debian programs aren’t prone to CVE-2025-4598 by default, since they do not embody any core dump handler until the systemd-coredump package deal 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 an area attacker can exploit the coredump of a crashed unix_chkpwd course of, which is used to confirm the validity of a consumer’s password, to acquire password hashes from the /and so on/shadow file.
Canonical, in an alert of its personal, mentioned the affect of CVE-2025-5054 is restricted to the confidentiality of the reminiscence house of invoked SUID executables and that the PoC exploit can leak hashed consumer passwords has restricted real-world affect.
“The exploitation of vulnerabilities in Apport and systemd-coredump can severely compromise the confidentiality at excessive threat, as attackers may extract delicate information, like passwords, encryption keys, or buyer data from core dumps,” Abbasi mentioned.
“The fallout consists of operational downtime, reputational harm, and potential non-compliance with rules. To mitigate these multifaceted dangers successfully, enterprises ought to undertake proactive security measures by prioritizing patches and mitigations, imposing strong monitoring, and tightening entry controls.”
