CVE-2010-4345: Exim Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

High severity, CVSS 7.8. Actively exploited: in CISA KEV since 2022-03-25. EPSS: 18% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Exim 4.72 and earlier allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging the ability of the exim user account to specify an alternate configuration file with a directive that contains arbitrary commands, as demonstrated by the spool_directory directive.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 6.06 only; version 8.04 only; version 9.10 only; version 10.04 only; version 10.10 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 5.0 only
• Exim Exim: up to and including 4.72
• Opensuse Opensuse: version 11.1 only; version 11.2 only; version 11.3 only

Published 2010-12-14. Last modified 2026-06-16.