CVE-2009-4146: Freebsd

High severity, CVSS 7.2. EPSS: 3.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The _rtld function in the Run-Time Link-Editor (rtld) in libexec/rtld-elf/rtld.c in FreeBSD 7.1, 7.2, and 8.0 does not clear the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, which allows local users to gain privileges by executing a setuid or setguid program with a modified LD_PRELOAD variable containing an untrusted search path that points to a Trojan horse library, a different vector than CVE-2009-4147.

Affected products

• Freebsd Freebsd: version 7.1 only; version 7.2 only; version 8.0 only

Published 2009-12-02. Last modified 2026-06-16.