CVE-2023-3972: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 0.3% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.
A vulnerability was found in insights-client. This security issue occurs because of insecure file operations or unsafe handling of temporary files and directories that lead to local privilege escalation. Before the insights-client has been registered on the system by root, an unprivileged local user or attacker could create the /var/tmp/insights-client directory (owning the directory with read, write, and execute permissions) on the system. After the insights-client is registered by root, an attacker could then control the directory content that insights are using by putting malicious scripts into it and executing arbitrary code as root (trivially bypassing SELinux protections because insights processes are allowed to disable SELinux system-wide).
Affected products
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Aus: version 8.6 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop: version 7.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Eus: version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only; version 9.0 only; version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Arm 64: version 8.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Arm 64 Eus: version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only; version 9.0 only; version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For IBM Z Systems: version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For IBM Z Systems Eus: version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only; version 9.0 only; version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Power Big Endian: version 7.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Power Little Endian: version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Power Little Endian Eus: version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only; version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux For Scientific Computing: version 7.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server: version 7.0 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Aus: version 8.2 only; version 8.4 only; version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server For Power Little Endian Update Services For SAP Solutions: version 8.1 only; version 8.2 only; version 8.4 only; version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only; version 9.0 only; …
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Tus: version 8.2 only; version 8.4 only; version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Update Services For SAP Solutions: version 9.2 only
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update Services For SAP Solutions: version 8.1 only; version 8.2 only; version 8.4 only; version 8.6 only; version 8.8 only
- Red Hat Insights-Client: before 3.2.2 (fixed in 3.2.2)
Published 2023-11-01. Last modified 2026-06-17.