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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.7

CVE-2017-16355 json

Phusion Passenger information disclosure

published 2017-12-14 8 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-cv3f-px9r-54hm , EUVD-2022-3633

cvss
4.7
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 30%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In agent/Core/SpawningKit/Spawner.h in Phusion Passenger 5.1.10 (fixed in Passenger Open Source 5.1.11 and Passenger Enterprise 5.1.10), if Passenger is running as root, it is possible to list the contents of arbitrary files on a system by symlinking a file named REVISION from the application root folder to a file of choice and querying passenger-status --show=xml.

Patch / fix

  • rubygems passenger 5.1.11
  • phusion passenger 5.1.10, 5.1.11
  • passenger Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 5.0.30-1.1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2017-16355

  • passenger Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 5.0.30-1+deb9u1build0.18.04.1
  • passenger Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS 5.0.27-2ubuntu0.1~esm1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2017-16355

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • rubygem-passenger SLE Module for Containers 12 5.0.18-12.5.1

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2018:0262-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2017-16355 updated cvss 4.7

passenger: arbitrary file read via REVISION symlink

  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 rubygem-passenger, ruby193-rubygem-passenger Red Hat Software Collections rh-passenger40-ruby22, rh-passenger40-ruby193, rh-passenger40-ruby200, rh-passenger40-passenger, rh-passenger40-mod_passenger
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat Satellite 6 mod_passenger, rubygem-passenger, ruby193-rubygem-passeger, rubygem-passenger-native, rubygem-passenger-native-libs
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.36% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 30% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 4.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD 2.0 1.2 AV:L/AC:H/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
GitHub 3.1 4.7 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
rubygems passenger
<5.1.11
5.1.11

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-200 Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.