CVE-2018-25078 — man-db before 2

man-db before 2.8.5 on Gentoo allows local users (with access to the man user account) to gain root privileges because /usr/bin/mandb is executed by root but not owned by root. (Also, the owner can strip the setuid and setgid bits.)

01What is this vulnerability?

man-db before 2.8.5 on Gentoo allows local users (with access to the man user account) to gain root privileges because /usr/bin/mandb is executed by root but not owned by root. (Also, the owner can strip the setuid and setgid bits.)

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2023-01-25T00:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2025-04-02T13:31:55.108Z

09References

• bugs.gentoo.org — https://bugs.gentoo.org/662438
• security.gentoo.org — https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202310-08