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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.1

CVE-2021-20315 json

A locking protection bypass flaw was found in some versions of gnome-shell as shipped within CentOS Stream 8, when the "Application menu" o…

published 2022-02-18 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-7740

cvss
6.1
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A locking protection bypass flaw was found in some versions of gnome-shell as shipped within CentOS Stream 8, when the "Application menu" or "Window list" GNOME extensions are enabled. This flaw allows a physical attacker who has access to a locked system to kill existing applications and start new ones as the locked user, even if the session is still locked.

Patch / fix

  • gnome gnome-shell 3.32.2

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-2021-20315 updated cvss 5.7

gnome-shell: locking protection bypass allow unauthorized user to kill existing applications or start new ones

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 gnome-shell, gnome-shell-browser-plugin Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 gnome-shell Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 gnome-shell
    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

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 10% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 6.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 3.6 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:P

Affected products

  • n/a gnome-shell

Classification

Weakness

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.