CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2020-10737 — Redhat Oddjob security vulnerability
A race condition was found in the mkhomedir tool shipped with the oddjob package in versions before 0.34.5 and 0.34.6 wherein, during the home creation, mkhomedir copies the /etc/skel directory into the newly created home and changes its ownership to the home's user without properly checking the homedir path. This flaw allows an attacker to leverage this issue by creating a symlink point to a target folder, which then has its ownership transferred to the new home directory's unprivileged user.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-05-27
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-362
Affected products
- redhat / oddjob
Matched remediation archetype
Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
- Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
- Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.
Remediate safely
- Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
- Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
- Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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