CVE-2016-6253

high

Published 2017-01-20 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.8

Description

mail.local in NetBSD versions 6.0 through 6.0.6, 6.1 through 6.1.5, and 7.0 allows local users to change ownership of or append data to arbitrary files on the target system via a symlink attack on the user mailbox.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

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.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-40385 local netbsd_x86 verified

Metasploit · 2016-09-15

NetBSD - 'mail.local(8)' Local Privilege Escalation (Metasploit)

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

EDB-40141 local bsd verified

akat1 · 2016-07-21

NetBSD - 'mail.local(8)' Local Privilege Escalation

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Metasploit modules

exploit_unix/local/netbsd_mail_local rank 500

NetBSD mail.local Privilege Escalation

Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact

FreeBSD Affected 14 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
7.0	Affected	—
6.1.5	Affected	—
6.1.4	Affected	—
6.1.3	Affected	—
6.1.2	Affected	—
6.1.1	Affected	—
6.1	Affected	—
6.0.6	Affected	—
6.0.5	Affected	—
6.0.4	Affected	—
6.0.3	Affected	—
6.0.2	Affected	—
6.0.1	Affected	—
6.0	Affected	—

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.