CVE-2016-5425

high

Published 2016-10-13 · Modified 2026-05-06

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CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.8

Description

The Tomcat package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, Fedora, CentOS, Oracle Linux, and possibly other Linux distributions uses weak permissions for /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/tomcat.conf, which allows local users to gain root privileges by leveraging membership in the tomcat group.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Metasploit modules

exploit_linux/local/tomcat_rhel_based_temp_priv_esc rank

Apache Tomcat on RedHat Based Systems Insecure Temp Config Privilege Escalation

Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact

OS	Version	Status	Fixed in
rhel	7.0	not-affected

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions
apache	tomcat	`-`
oracle	instantis_enterprisetrack	`17.1`
oracle	instantis_enterprisetrack	`17.2`
oracle	instantis_enterprisetrack	`17.3`

References

CWEs

CWE-276

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.