CVE-2009-5081: GNU Groff

Low severity, CVSS 3.3. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The (1) config.guess, (2) contrib/groffer/perl/groffer.pl, and (3) contrib/groffer/perl/roff2.pl scripts in GNU troff (aka groff) 1.21 and earlier use an insufficient number of X characters in the template argument to the tempfile function, which makes it easier for local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on a temporary file, a different vulnerability than CVE-2004-0969.

Affected products

• GNU Groff: up to and including 1.21; version 1.10 only; version 1.11 only; version 1.11a only; version 1.14 only; version 1.15 only; …

Published 2011-06-30. Last modified 2026-06-16.