CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-37941 — Elastic Apm Agent security vulnerability
A local privilege escalation issue was found with the APM Java agent, where a user on the system could attach a malicious file to an application running with the APM Java agent. Using this vector, a malicious or compromised user account could use the agent to run commands at a higher level of permissions than they possess. This vulnerability affects users that have set up the agent via the attacher cli 3, the attach API 2, as well as users that have enabled the profiling_inferred_spans_enabled option
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.8 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-12-08
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- java/maven
- Weaknesses
- CWE-269
Affected products
- elastic / apm_agent
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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