CVE-2025-4598
Published: 30 May 2025
Summary
CVE-2025-4598 is a medium-severity Signal Handler Race Condition (CWE-364) vulnerability in Systemd Project Systemd. Its CVSS base score is 4.7 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (T1003.008); ranked at the 29.3th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2025-16486
Vulnerability details
A vulnerability was found in systemd-coredump. This flaw allows an attacker to force a SUID process to crash and replace it with a non-SUID binary to access the original's privileged process coredump, allowing the attacker to read sensitive data, such…
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as /etc/shadow content, loaded by the original process. A SUID binary or process has a special type of permission, which allows the process to run with the file owner's permissions, regardless of the user executing the binary. This allows the process to access more restricted data than unprivileged users or processes would be able to. An attacker can leverage this flaw by forcing a SUID process to crash and force the Linux kernel to recycle the process PID before systemd-coredump can analyze the /proc/pid/auxv file. If the attacker wins the race condition, they gain access to the original's SUID process coredump file. They can read sensitive content loaded into memory by the original binary, affecting data confidentiality.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
CVE-2025-4598 in systemd-coredump enables local unprivileged attackers to exploit a race condition on SUID process crashes, accessing privileged core dumps containing sensitive data like /etc/shadow (T1003.008) through exploitation for credential access (T1212).
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.