New Linux Vulnerabilities Put Millions of Password Hashes at Risk
Two critical local information-disclosure vulnerabilities have been uncovered, affecting millions of Linux systems worldwide. These flaws could allow attackers to extract sensitive password data through manipulated core dumps—posing a serious security risk to enterprises and individuals alike. The Discovery The vulnerabilities, disclosed by the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), target core dump handlers used in major Linux distributions. They involve race conditions that can be exploited to access core dumps generated by SUID (Set User ID) programs —a class of privileged executables. CVE-2025-5054 targets Apport , Ubuntu’s crash reporting system. CVE-2025-4598 affects systemd-coredump , the default handler in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 & 10 and Fedora 40/41 . Qualys researchers demonstrated successful proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits that allow attackers to manipulate processes like unix_chkpwd —a standard Linux utility for password verification—and extract pas...