CVE-2009-5081

low
Published 2011-06-30 ยท Modified 2026-04-29
CVSS v3
โ€”
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
3.3

Description

The (1) config.guess, (2) contrib/groffer/perl/groffer.pl, and (3) contrib/groffer/perl/roff2.pl scripts in GNU troff (aka groff) 1.21 and earlier use an insufficient number of X characters in the template argument to the tempfile function, which makes it easier for local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on a temporary file, a different vulnerability than CVE-2004-0969.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
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

debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 1.20.1-5
sid Fixed 1.20.1-5
forky Fixed 1.20.1-5
bullseye Fixed 1.20.1-5
bookworm Fixed 1.20.1-5

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
gnugroff{"endIncluding":"1.21"}
gnugroff1.10
gnugroff1.11
gnugroff1.11a
gnugroff1.14
gnugroff1.15
gnugroff1.16
gnugroff1.16.1
gnugroff1.17.1
gnugroff1.17.2
gnugroff1.18.1
gnugroff1.19
gnugroff1.19.1
gnugroff1.19.2
gnugroff1.20
gnugroff1.20.1

References

CWEs

CWE-59

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

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