privilege escalation via excessive /etc/passwd permissions
CVE: CVE-2025-57852
Component: openshift-ai
CWE: CWE-276
Severity: Low
CVSS v3: 6.7/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Release date: 2025-09-30T14:25:00+00:00

A container privilege escalation flaw was found in KServe ModelMesh container images. This issue stems from the /etc/passwd file being created with group-writable permissions during build time. In certain conditions, an attacker who can execute commands within an affected container, even as a non-root user, can leverage their membership in the root group to modify the /etc/passwd file. This could allow the attacker to add a new user with any arbitrary UID, including UID 0, leading to full root privileges within the container.

Statement: Red Hat Product Security has rated this vulnerability as moderate severity for affected products which run on OpenShift. The vulnerability allows for potential privilege escalation within a container, but OpenShift's default, multi-layered security posture effectively mitigates this risk. 

The primary controls include the default Security Context Constraints (SCC), which severely limit a container's permissions from the start, and SELinux, which enforces mandatory access control to ensure strict isolation. While other container runtime environments may have different controls available and require case-by-case analysis, OpenShift's built-in defenses are designed to prevent this type of attack.

Out of Box RHEL configuration isolates a single process inside a container. Unless multiple processes are packaged inside a single container, that defeats the principle behind containerization, this bug can not be used to meaningfully escalate privileges.

Also, RHEL, and any common linux distributions do NOT add any additional users to the root group. The presence of the root group is strictly due to conformance with POSIX permission management requirements and can be considered to be an artifact of filesystem permission limitations.

Red Hat Security Ratings classify this as a Low and not Moderate in Red Hat OpenShift AI due to the restrictive SCC profile used for the ModelMesh containers. The restricted-v2 profile fully mitigates this vulnerability by dropping the SETUID and SETGID privileges, blocking the two system calls from processes within the container and preventing privilege escalation.

Remediation:
For Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.16.3 see the following documentation, which will be updated shortly for this release, for important instructions on how to upgrade your cluster and fully apply this errata update:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_ai/
For Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.19.3 see the following documentation, which will be updated shortly for this release, for important instructions on how to upgrade your cluster and fully apply this errata update:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_ai/
For Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.21.1 see the following documentation, which will be updated shortly for this release, for important instructions on how to upgrade your cluster and fully apply this errata update:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_ai/
For Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.22.2 see the following documentation, which will be updated shortly for this release, for important instructions on how to upgrade your cluster and fully apply this errata update:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_ai/
For Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.24.0 see the following documentation, which will be updated shortly for this release, for important instructions on how to upgrade your cluster and fully apply this errata update:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_openshift_ai/