ABRT daemon: shell metacharacters in mount info give an unprivileged local user root

Impact

ABRT, the crash-reporting daemon that runs as root on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, copies up to 12 characters of untrusted mount information straight into a shell command (docker inspect %s) without validation. An unprivileged local user can inject shell metacharacters in that field and have the root-running daemon execute their command, which yields full root on the host. On a GPU node this turns any tenant or job that gets a local shell - a bare-metal batch user, an SSH-accessible login node, a container escape that only reached an unprivileged UID - into host root, which means access to every other tenant's data on the node, the kubelet or Slurm credentials, and the GPU devices directly. The 12-character limit constrains the payload but does not prevent exploitation. Note the bug is in ABRT's container-detection path, not in Docker itself.

Who can reach it

Local, authenticated: any unprivileged user with a shell on a RHEL host where the ABRT daemon is running. No network access and no existing privileges beyond an ordinary account are needed. Hosts without abrt installed or with the service disabled are not exposed.

What to do

Apply the Red Hat abrt update for your RHEL release; consult Red Hat's CVE page for the errata per version, as RHEL 6 and 7 are out of full support and may require an extended-support subscription or a mitigation instead. The fix is a package update plus restarting the abrt services, so no reboot and no node drain - a daemon restart on each host. Where no fix is available for your release, the mitigation is to stop and mask the ABRT services (abrtd, abrt-ccpp); crash reporting is rarely load-bearing on a GPU node, and most operators collecting core dumps centrally can disable it outright.

References

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