CVE-2017-16997

high
Published 2017-12-18 ยท Modified 2026-05-13
CVSS v3
7.8
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
7.8

Description

elf/dl-load.c in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) 2.19 through 2.26 mishandles RPATH and RUNPATH containing $ORIGIN for a privileged (setuid or AT_SECURE) program, which allows local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse library in the current working directory, related to the fillin_rpath and decompose_rpath functions. This is associated with misinterpretion of an empty RPATH/RUNPATH token as the "./" directory. NOTE: this configuration of RPATH/RUNPATH for a privileged program is apparently very uncommon; most likely, no such program is shipped with any common Linux distribution.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
75%
Patch ETA
โ€”

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 โ€” if you've already worked around this in production โ€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

โœš Propose a mitigation on Community โ†’ 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.

OS impact

OSVersionStatusFixed in
suse slesaffected
debian debianbookwormfixed2.25-6
debian debianbullseyefixed2.25-6
debian debianforkyfixed2.25-6
debian debiansidfixed2.25-6
debian debiantrixiefixed2.25-6
redhat rhel7.0affected

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
gnuglibc2.19
gnuglibc2.20
gnuglibc2.21
gnuglibc2.22
gnuglibc2.23
gnuglibc2.25
gnuglibc2.26

References

CWEs

CWE-426

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

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