About Elevation of Privilege – needrestart (CVE-2024-48990) vulnerability. On November 19, Qualys released a security bulletin about five privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the needrestart utility (CVE-2024-48990, CVE-2024-48991, CVE-2024-48992, CVE-2024-10224, and CVE-2024-11003) used in Ubuntu Server, starting with version 21.04.

The needrestart utility runs automatically after APT operations (installing, updating, or removing packages). It checks if a reboot is required, thus ensuring that services use updated libraries without unnecessary downtime.

All 5 vulnerabilities make it possible for a regular user to become root. Qualys has private exploits for each. There is currently a publicly available exploit only for one vulnerability related to the PYTHONPATH environment variable.⚡️ It is available on Github since November 20th.

Update needrestart to version 3.8 or disable “interpreter scanning” in needrestart.conf.

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Alexander Leonov

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