shadow 4.8, in certain circumstances affecting at least Gentoo, Arch Linux, and Void Linux, allows local users to obtain root access because setuid programs are misconfigured. Specifically, this affects shadow 4.8 when compiled using --with-libpam but without explicitly passing --disable-account-tools-setuid, and without a PAM configuration suitable for use with setuid account management tools. This combination leads to account management tools (groupadd, groupdel, groupmod, useradd, userdel, usermod) that can easily be used by unprivileged local users to escalate privileges to root in multiple ways. This issue became much more relevant in approximately December 2019 when an unrelated bug was fixed (i.e., the chmod calls to suidusbins were fixed in the upstream Makefile which is now included in the release version 4.8).

An exploitable information disclosure vulnerability exists in the network packet handling functionality of Shadowsocks-libev 3.3.2. When utilizing a Stream Cipher, a specially crafted set of network packets can cause an outbound connection from the server, resulting in information disclosure. An attacker can send arbitrary packets to trigger this vulnerability.

An exploitable code execution vulnerability exists in the ss-manager binary of Shadowsocks-libev 3.3.2. Specially crafted network packets sent to ss-manager can cause an arbitrary binary to run, resulting in code execution and privilege escalation. An attacker can send network packets to trigger this vulnerability.

An exploitable denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the UDPRelay functionality of Shadowsocks-libev 3.3.2. When utilizing a Stream Cipher and a local_address, arbitrary UDP packets can cause a FATAL error code path and exit. An attacker can send arbitrary UDP packets to trigger this vulnerability.

shadow: TOCTOU (time-of-check time-of-use) race condition when copying and removing directory trees

There is a possible tty hijacking in shadow 4.x before 4.1.5 and sudo 1.x before 1.7.4 via "su - user -c program". The user session can be escaped to the parent session by using the TIOCSTI ioctl to push characters into the input buffer to be read by the next process.

The network protocol of Blade Shadow though 2.13.3 allows remote attackers to take control of a Shadow instance and execute arbitrary code by only knowing the victim's IP address, because packet data can be injected into the unencrypted UDP packet stream.

Privilege escalation can occur in the SUSE useradd.c code in useradd, as distributed in the SUSE shadow package through 4.2.1-27.9.1 for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SLE-12) and through 4.5-5.39 for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (SLE-15). Non-existing intermediate directories are created with mode 0777 during user creation. Given that they are world-writable, local attackers might use this for privilege escalation and other unspecified attacks. NOTE: this would affect non-SUSE users who took useradd.c code from a 2014-04-02 upstream pull request; however, no non-SUSE distribution is known to be affected.

shadowsock was a malicious module published with the intent to hijack environment variables. It has been unpublished by npm.

An issue was discovered in shadow 4.5. newgidmap (in shadow-utils) is setuid and allows an unprivileged user to be placed in a user namespace where setgroups(2) is permitted. This allows an attacker to remove themselves from a supplementary group, which may allow access to certain filesystem paths if the administrator has used "group blacklisting" (e.g., chmod g-rwx) to restrict access to paths. This flaw effectively reverts a security feature in the kernel (in particular, the /proc/self/setgroups knob) to prevent this sort of privilege escalation.