Glibc: buffer overflow in ld.so leading to privilege escalation

Primary CVSS: v3.1 7.8 HIGH from [email protected]

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

EPSS: 0.715340000 probability, percentile 0.987490000 (date 2026-05-12)

CISA KEV: Listed on 2023-11-21; due 2023-12-12; ransomware use Unknown

Problem Types: CWE-122 | CWE-787 | CWE-122 Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Discovery Credit

CNA: Red Hat would like to thank Qualys Research Labs for reporting this issue. (en)

Workarounds

CNA: For customers who cannot update immediately and do not have Secure Boot feature enabled, the issue can be mitigated using the provided SystemTap script with the following steps. When enabled, any setuid program invoked with GLIBC_TUNABLES in the environment will be terminated immediately. To invoke the setuid program, users will then have to unset or clear the GLIBC_TUNABLES envvar, e.g. `GLIBC_TUNABLES= sudo` . Note that these mitigation steps will need to be repeated if the system is rebooted. 1) Install required systemtap packages and dependencies as per - https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5441 2) Create the following systemtap script, and name it stap_block_suid_tunables.stp: ~~~ function has_tunable_string:long() { name = "GLIBC_TUNABLES" mm = @task(task_current())->mm; if (mm) { env_start = @mm(mm)->env_start; env_end = @mm(mm)->env_end; if (env_start != 0 && env_end != 0) while (env_end > env_start) { cur = user_string(env_start, ""); env_name = tokenize(cur, "="); if (env_name == name && tokenize("", "") != "") return 1; env_start += strlen (cur) + 1 } } return 0; } probe process("/lib*/ld*.so*").function("__tunables_init") { atsecure = 0; /* Skip processing if we can't read __libc_enable_secure, e.g. core dump handler (systemd-cgroups-agent and systemd-coredump). */ try { atsecure = @var("__libc_enable_secure"); } catch { printk (4, sprintf ("CVE-2023-4911: Skipped check: %s (%d)", execname(), pid())); } if (atsecure && has_tunable_string ()) raise (9); } ~~~ 3) Load the systemtap module into the running kernel: ~~~ stap -g -F -m stap_block_suid_tunables stap_block_suid_tunables.stp ~~~ 4) Ensure the module is loaded: ~~~ lsmod | grep -i stap_block_suid_tunables stap_block_suid_tunables 249856 0 ~~~ 5) Once the glibc package is updated to the version containing the fix, the systemtap generated kernel module can be removed by running: ~~~ rmmod stap_block_suid_tunables ~~~ If Secure Boot is enabled on a system, the SystemTap module must be signed. An external compiling server can be used to sign the generated kernel module with a key enrolled into the kernel's keyring or starting with SystemTap 4.7 you can sign a module without a compile server. See further information here - https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/secure-boot-systemtap