CVE-2025-4598Systemd-coredump: race condition that allows a local attacker to crash a suid program and gain read access to the resulting core dump

Description

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. An attacker can leverage this flaw by forcing a SUID process to crash and force the Linux kernel to recycle the process PID before systemd-coredump can analyze the /proc/pid/auxv file. If the attacker wins the race condition, they gain access to the original's SUID process coredump file. They can read sensitive content loaded into memory by the original binary, affecting data confidentiality.

Timeline

Scores

EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)

1.3% · top 30% of all CVEs (12 Nov 2026)

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Medium 4.7.

Affected products

• systemd-coredump

  • affected < 252.37
  • affected 253.0 – < 253.32
  • affected 254.0 – < 254.25
  • affected 255.0 – < 255.19
  • affected 256.0 – < 256.14
  • affected 257.0 – < 257.6

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

  • unaffected 0:257-23.el10 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

  • unaffected 0:252-55.el9_7.7 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

  • unaffected 0:252-55.el9_7.7 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Ceph Storage 7

  • unaffected 7 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Ceph Storage 8

  • unaffected 8 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Ceph Storage 8

  • unaffected 1769512383 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Discovery 2

  • unaffected 1767888970 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Discovery 2

  • unaffected 1767904573 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Insights proxy 1.5

  • unaffected 1.5.9-1765201856 – < *

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

  All versions: unaffected

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

  All versions: unaffected

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  All versions: unaffected

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  All versions: affected

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

  All versions: affected

• Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

  All versions: unaffected

• Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4

  All versions: unaffected

• Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4

  All versions: affected

• Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4

  All versions: unaffected

What to do

Workaround: This issue can be mitigated by disabling the capability of the system to generate a coredump for SUID binaries. The perform that, the following command can be ran as `root` user: ~~~ echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable ~~~ While this mitigates this vulnerability while it's not possible to update the systemd package, it disables the capability of analyzing crashes for such binaries.

Sources

The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.

• CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
• CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
• NVD (opens in a new tab)
• FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
• EUVD EUVD-2025-16486 (opens in a new tab)
• OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
• GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
• CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)

Badge for a README or a ticket

[![CVE-2025-4598](https://cveledger.app/badge/CVE-2025-4598.svg)](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2025-4598)

Record last updated 5 Nov 2026, 15:46 UTC.