CVE-2013-4559

high

Published 2013-11-20 · Modified 2026-04-29

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.6

Description

lighttpd before 1.4.33 does not check the return value of the (1) setuid, (2) setgid, or (3) setgroups functions, which might cause lighttpd to run as root if it is restarted and allows remote attackers to gain privileges, as demonstrated by multiple calls to the clone function that cause setuid to fail when the user process limit is reached.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → 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

SUSE Affected 3 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
13.1	Affected	—
12.3	Affected	—
12.2	Affected	—

Debian Mixed 8 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`1.4.33-1+nmu1`
sid	Fixed	`1.4.33-1+nmu1`
forky	Fixed	`1.4.33-1+nmu1`
bullseye	Fixed	`1.4.33-1+nmu1`
bookworm	Fixed	`1.4.33-1+nmu1`
8.0	Affected	—
7.0	Affected	—
6.0	Affected	—

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
lighttpd	lighttpd	`{"endExcluding":"1.4.33"}`	`1.4.33`

References

CWEs

CWE-264

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

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