CVE-2009-5079 describes a local privilege escalation vulnerability in GNU troff (groff) versions 1.21 and earlier. Specifically, the gendef.sh, doc/fixinfo.sh, and contrib/gdiffmk/tests/runtests.in scripts are susceptible to a symlink attack on temporary files, allowing a local attacker to overwrite arbitrary files. The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 3.3 (AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:P), indicating low severity with local access and medium attack complexity, leading to partial integrity and availability impact. There is no evidence of active exploitation, no known public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), and minimal community discussion or media coverage.
| Vendor | Product | Version(s) | CPE |
|---|---|---|---|
<= 1.21CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:gnu:groff:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | ||
1.10CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:gnu:groff:1.10:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | ||
1.11CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:gnu:groff:1.11:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | ||
1.11aCPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:gnu:groff:1.11a:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | ||
1.14CPE matchmatch criteria | cpe:2.3:a:gnu:groff:1.14:*:*:*:*:*:*:* |
CVSS version used by this source: 2.0
AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:P
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.0 Bluesky, 0.0 Mastodon, and 0.2 GitHub mentions.
No media coverage found for this CVE.
The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.