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CVE-2021-3982

21
FAUCET Score

CVE-2021-3982 is a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting gnome-shell in Linux distributions that utilize CAP_SYS_NICE. A low-privileged attacker could exploit this to increase their process scheduler priority, potentially leading to a denial of service for other services on the same machine. With a CVSS score of 5.5 (Medium), it requires local access and has a high impact on availability. There is currently no known active exploitation, public exploit code (Metasploit, Nuclei, ExploitDB), or significant community discussion surrounding this vulnerability.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
Range not provided by sourceCPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:gnome:gnome-shell:-:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 3.1

5.5MEDIUM

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Attack Vector
LOCAL
Attack Complexity
LOW
Privileges Required
LOW
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality Impact
NONE
Integrity Impact
NONE
Availability Impact
HIGH
Exploitability Score
1.8
Impact Score
3.6
CvssVersion
3.1

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
0.29%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
20.7%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-27
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0029 is in the 77th percentile among its peer group of 15,940 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.0 Bluesky, 0.0 Mastodon, and 0.1 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

No media coverage found for this CVE.

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.1 InfoSec Media, 0.0 Vendor Blog, and 0.0 Security Researcher mentions.

Remediation

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2021-3982Moderate

gnome-shell: Distributions using CAP_SYS_NICE in gnome-shell may be exposed to privilege escalation

Nov 24, 2021

References

gitlab.gnome.org / GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2284
Issue TrackingPatchThird Party Advisory
gitlab.gnome.org / GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2060
Issue TrackingPatchThird Party Advisory