CVE-2025-7195

Medium [CVE-2025-7195] privilege escalation due to incorrect permissions of /etc/passwd

CVE-2025-7195Source published Aug 7, 2025Source updated Aug 7, 2025

Early versions of Operator-SDK provided an insecure method to allow operator containers to run in environments that used a random UID. Operator-SDK before 0.15.2 provided a script, user_setup, which modifies the permissions of the /etc/passwd file to 664 during build time. Developers who used Operator-SDK before 0.15.2 to scaffold their operator may still be impacted by this if the insecure user_setup script is still being used to build new container images. In affected images, the /etc/passwd file is created during build time with group-writable permissions and a group ownership of root (gid=0). An attacker who can execute commands within an affected container, even as a non-root user, may be able to leverage their membership in the root group to modify the /etc/passwd file. This could…

Affected products in this advisory

• RHEL-9-CNV-4.17
• RHEL-9-CNV-4.18
• RHEL-9-CNV-4.20
• Compliance Operator 1

18 more entries in the full advisory.

Source-reported affected versions

• < 0.15.2

Source-reported fixed versions

• container-native-virtualization/cluster-network-addons-operator-rhel9:v4.17.39-2
• container-native-virtualization/cluster-network-addons-operator-rhel9:v4.18.25-3
• container-native-virtualization/cluster-network-addons-operator-rhel9:v4.20.3-3
• compliance/openshift-compliance-rhel8-operator:1.8.0

46 more entries in the full advisory.

Mitigation guidance

• In Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the following default configurations reduce the impact of this vulnerability. Security Context Constraints (SCCs): The default SCC, Restricted-v2, applies several crucial security settings to containers. Capabilities: drop: ALL removes all Linux capabilities, including SETUID and SETGID. This prevents a process from changing its user or group ID, a common step in privilege escalation attacks. The SETUID and SETGID capabilities can also be dropped explicitly if other capabilities are still required. allowPrivilegeEscalation: false ensures that a process cannot gain more privileges than its parent process. This blocks attempts by a compromised container process to grant itself additional capabilities. SELinux Mandatory Access Control (MAC): Pods are required to run with a pre-allocated Multi-Category Security (MCS) label. This SELinux feature provides a strong layer of isolation between containers and from the host system. A properly configured SELinux policy can prevent a container escape, even if an attacker gains elevated permissions within the container itself. Filesystem Hardening: While not a default setting, a common security practice is to set readOnlyRootFilesystem: true in a container's security context. In this specific scenario, this configuration would prevent an attacker from modifying critical files like /etc/passwd, even if they managed to gain file-level write permissions.