Medium [CVE-2025-4598] race condition that allows a local attacker to crash a suid program and gain read access to the resulting core dump

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 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.

If the attacker wins the race condition, they gain access to the original's SUID process coredump file. This flaw was rated as having a severity of Moderate due to the complexity to exploit this flaw.

The attacker needs to setup a way to win the race condition and have an unprivileged local account to successfully exploit this vulnerability. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 4.7 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N).

Weakness: CWE-364. Affected Red Hat products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9; Red Hat Ceph Storage 7; Red Hat Ceph Storage 8; Red Hat Discovery 2; Red Hat Insights proxy 1.5; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8; Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.

Affected products named by the advisory: Red Hat package: systemd.