CVE-2017-12424

critical

Published 2017-08-04 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

9.8

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

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

9.8

Description

In shadow before 4.5, the newusers tool could be made to manipulate internal data structures in ways unintended by the authors. Malformed input may lead to crashes (with a buffer overflow or other memory corruption) or other unspecified behaviors. This crosses a privilege boundary in, for example, certain web-hosting environments in which a Control Panel allows an unprivileged user account to create subaccounts.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

97%

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.

OS impact

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Debian Mixed 6 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`1:4.5-1`
sid	Fixed	`1:4.5-1`
forky	Fixed	`1:4.5-1`
bullseye	Fixed	`1:4.5-1`
bookworm	Fixed	`1:4.5-1`
9.0	Affected	—

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
shadow_project	shadow	`{"endExcluding":"4.5"}`	`4.5`

References

CWEs

CWE-119

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

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