CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2020-26880 — Sympa Sympa security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

Sympa through 6.2.57b.2 allows a local privilege escalation from the sympa user account to full root access by modifying the sympa.conf configuration file (which is owned by sympa) and parsing it through the setuid sympa_newaliases-wrapper executable.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.1)
Published
2020-10-07
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-269

Affected products

  • sympa / sympa
  • sympa / sympa / 6.2.57
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 32
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 33
  • fedoraproject / fedora / 34
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0

Showing 6 representative product identities from 7 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
  • Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
  • Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.

Remediate safely

  • Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
  • Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
  • Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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