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.
The product performs operations on a memory buffer, but it reads from or writes to a memory location outside the buffer's intended boundary. This may result in read or write operations on unexpected memory locations that could be linked to other variables, data structures, or internal program data.
| Link | Tags |
|---|---|
| https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756630 | third party advisory issue tracking |
| https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201710-16 | third party advisory vendor advisory |
| https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/commit/954e3d2e7113e9ac06632aee3c69b8d818cc8952 | third party advisory patch |
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shadow/+bug/1266675 | third party advisory issue tracking |
| https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/03/msg00020.html | third party advisory mailing list |