CWE-271
Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
ClassIncompleteLikelihood: High
Description
The product does not drop privileges before passing control of a resource to an actor that does not have those privileges.
In some contexts, a system executing with elevated permissions will hand off a process/file/etc. to another process or user. If the privileges of an entity are not reduced, then elevated privileges are spread throughout a system and possibly to an attacker.
Hierarchy (View 1000)
CVEs mapped to this weakness (5)
| CVE | Sev | Risk | CVSS | EPSS | KEV | Published | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2025-23395 | Hig | 0.51 | 7.8 | 0.00 | May 26, 2025 | Screen 5.0.0 when it runs with setuid-root privileges does not drop privileges while operating on a user supplied path. This allows unprivileged users to create files in arbitrary locations with `root` ownership, the invoking user's (real) group ownership and file mode 0644. All data written to the Screen PTY will be logged into this file, allowing to escalate to root privileges | |
| CVE-2026-35535 | Hig | 0.48 | 7.4 | 0.00 | Apr 3, 2026 | In Sudo through 1.9.17p2 before 3e474c2, a failure of a setuid, setgid, or setgroups call, during a privilege drop before running the mailer, is not a fatal error and can lead to privilege escalation. | |
| CVE-2025-53819 | Hig | 0.44 | 7.9 | 0.00 | Jul 14, 2025 | Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix systems. Builds with Nix 2.30.0 on macOS were executed with elevated privileges (root), instead of the build users. The fix was applied to Nix 2.30.1. No known workarounds are available. | |
| CVE-2026-25704 | Med | 0.38 | — | 0.00 | Mar 30, 2026 | A Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors/Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition vulnerability in cosmic-greeter can allow an attacker to regain privileges that should have been dropped and abuse them in the racy checking logic. This issue affects cosmic-greeter before https://github.Com/pop-os/cosmic-greeter/pull/426. | |
| CVE-2024-35179 | Med | 0.37 | 6.8 | 0.00 | May 15, 2024 | Stalwart Mail Server is an open-source mail server. Prior to version 0.8.0, when using `RUN_AS_USER`, the specified user (and therefore, web interface admins) can read arbitrary files as root. This issue affects admins who have set up to run stalwart with `RUN_AS_USER` who handed out admin credentials to the mail server but expect these to only grant access according to the `RUN_AS_USER` and are attacked where the attackers managed to achieve Arbitrary Code Execution using another vulnerability. Version 0.8.0 contains a patch for the issue. |