CVE-2017-16997: GNU Glibc

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 2.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

elf/dl-load.c in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) 2.19 through 2.26 mishandles RPATH and RUNPATH containing $ORIGIN for a privileged (setuid or AT_SECURE) program, which allows local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse library in the current working directory, related to the fillin_rpath and decompose_rpath functions. This is associated with misinterpretion of an empty RPATH/RUNPATH token as the "./" directory. NOTE: this configuration of RPATH/RUNPATH for a privileged program is apparently very uncommon; most likely, no such program is shipped with any common Linux distribution.

Affected products

• GNU Glibc: version 2.19 only; version 2.20 only; version 2.21 only; version 2.22 only; version 2.23 only; version 2.25 only; …
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop: version 7.0 only
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server: version 7.0 only
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation: version 7.0 only

Published 2017-12-18. Last modified 2026-06-17.