Systemd
CVE-2022-45873
MEDIUM
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A06:2025 - Insecure Design
ASVS 5.0
V2 - Validation and Business Logic Resource consumption limits
MITRE ATT&CK
1 technique across 1 tactic: Impact The technique list with ATT&CK links and the kill-chain view is part of the Basic plan and up. |
| Impact | CVSS score of 5.5 (MEDIUM). Attack characteristics: local attack vector, low complexity, low privileges required, no user interaction not required. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | A local attacker with access to the system could cause denial of service by exhausting system resources. |
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Alert meAnalysisAI
systemd 250 and 251 allows local users to achieve a systemd-coredump deadlock by triggering a crash that has a long backtrace. Rated medium severity (CVSS 5.5), this vulnerability is low attack complexity. This Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability could allow attackers to cause denial of service by exhausting system resources.
RemediationAI
A vendor patch is available. Apply the latest security update as soon as possible. Implement rate limiting, set resource quotas, validate input sizes, use timeouts.
Affects your stack
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Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.
Technical ContextAI · show details
This vulnerability is classified as Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400), which allows attackers to cause denial of service by exhausting system resources. systemd 250 and 251 allows local users to achieve a systemd-coredump deadlock by triggering a crash that has a long backtrace. This occurs in parse_elf_object in shared/elf-util.c. The exploitation methodology is to crash a binary calling the same function recursively, and put it in a deeply nested directory to make its backtrace large enough to cause the deadlock. This must be done 16 times when MaxConnections=16 is set for the systemd/units/systemd-coredump.socket file. Affected products include: Systemd Project Systemd, Fedoraproject Fedora.
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- Exploit and PoC references, threat intelligence from 22 sources
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Severity by source
AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Primary rating from NVD · only source for this CVE.
CVSS VectorNVD
DescriptionNVD
systemd 250 and 251 allows local users to achieve a systemd-coredump deadlock by triggering a crash that has a long backtrace. This occurs in parse_elf_object in shared/elf-util.c. The exploitation methodology is to crash a binary calling the same function recursively, and put it in a deeply nested directory to make its backtrace large enough to cause the deadlock. This must be done 16 times when MaxConnections=16 is set for the systemd/units/systemd-coredump.socket file.
Threat Intelligence Overview
NVD
CVE.org
EPSS
GitHub
VulDB
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Denial of Service attacks render applications or systems unavailable by overwhelming resources or triggering failure conditions.
Affected Products (CPE)NVD
Stack-based buffer overflow in the getpwnam and getgrnam functions of the NSS module nss-mymachines in systemd. Rated cr
Integer overflow in the valid_user_field function in journal/journald-native.c in systemd allows remote attackers to cau
systemd before 247 does not adequately block local privilege escalation for some Sudo configurations, e.g., plausible su
A flaw in systemd v228 in /src/basic/fs-util.c caused world writable suid files to be created when using the systemd tim
It was discovered that a systemd service that uses DynamicUser property can get new privileges through the execution of
It was discovered that a systemd service that uses DynamicUser property can create a SUID/SGID binary that would be allo
A vulnerability in unit_deserialize of systemd allows an attacker to supply arbitrary state across systemd re-execution
systemd-tmpfiles in systemd through 237 mishandles symlinks present in non-terminal path components, which allows local
basic/unit-name.c in systemd prior to 246.15, 247.8, 248.5, and 249.1 has a Memory Allocation with an Excessive Size Val
In systemd before v242-rc4, it was discovered that pam_systemd does not properly sanitize the environment before using t
A race condition in chown_one() of systemd allows an attacker to cause systemd to set arbitrary permissions on arbitrary
systemd v233 and earlier fails to safely parse usernames starting with a numeric digit (e.g. Rated critical severity (CV
Exploit-DB