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Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2019-19882 json

shadow 4.8, in certain circumstances affecting at least Gentoo, Arch Linux, and Void Linux, allows local users to obtain root access becaus…

published 2019-12-18 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-9475

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.5%
EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 44%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

shadow 4.8, in certain circumstances affecting at least Gentoo, Arch Linux, and Void Linux, allows local users to obtain root access because setuid programs are misconfigured. Specifically, this affects shadow 4.8 when compiled using --with-libpam but without explicitly passing --disable-account-tools-setuid, and without a PAM configuration suitable for use with setuid account management tools. This combination leads to account management tools (groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, useradd, userdel, usermod) that can easily be used by unprivileged local users to escalate privileges to root in multiple ways. This issue became much more relevant in approximately December 2019 when an unrelated bug was fixed (i.e., the chmod calls to suidusbins were fixed in the upstream Makefile which is now included in the release version 4.8).

Patch / fix

  • shadow Debian 14, Debian 13, Debian 12 1:4.8.1-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2019-19882

  • shadow Arch Linux 4.8-1

arch linux advisories AVG-1079

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-2019-19882 updated cvss 7.8

shadow-utils: local users can obtain root access because setuid programs are misconfigured

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 shadow-utils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 shadow-utils, shadow-utils-subid Red Hat Virtualization 4 shadow-utils
    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

0.52% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 44% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • bugs.archlinux.org https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64836 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • bugs.gentoo.org https://bugs.gentoo.org/702252 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 6.9 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

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.