CVE-2025-57849

Description

fuse: privilege escalation via excessive /etc/passwd permissions

Red Hat statement

Red Hat Product Security has rated this vulnerability as moderate severity for affected products which run on OpenShift. The vulnerability allows for potential privilege escalation within a container, but OpenShift's default, multi-layered security posture effectively mitigates this risk. The primary controls include the default Security Context Constraints (SCC), which severely limit a container's permissions from the start, and SELinux, which enforces mandatory access control to ensure strict isolation. While other container runtime environments may have different controls available and require case-by-case analysis, OpenShift's built-in defenses are designed to prevent this type of attack. Out of Box RHEL configuration isolates a single process inside a container. Unless multiple processes are packaged inside a single container, that defeats the principle behind containerization, this bug can not be used to meaningfully escalate privileges. Also, RHEL, and any common linux distributions do NOT add any additional users to the root group. The presence of the root group is strictly due to conformance with POSIX permission management requirements and can be considered to be an artifact of filesystem permission limitations.

CVSS v3: 6.4 (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H)

Package state