CVE-2010-3431

low
Published 2011-01-24 ยท Modified 2026-04-29
CVSS v3
โ€”
CVSS v4 NEW
โ€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
1.9

Description

The privilege-dropping implementation in the (1) pam_env and (2) pam_mail modules in Linux-PAM (aka pam) 1.1.2 does not check the return value of the setfsuid system call, which might allow local users to obtain sensitive information by leveraging an unintended uid, as demonstrated by a symlink attack on the .pam_environment file in a user's home directory. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2010-3435.

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 1.1.3-1
sid Fixed 1.1.3-1
forky Fixed 1.1.3-1
bullseye Fixed 1.1.3-1
bookworm Fixed 1.1.3-1

Application impact

VendorProductVersionsFixed
linux-pamlinux-pam1.1.2

References

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

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