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CVE-2015-7496

20
FAUCET Score

CVE-2015-7496 describes a lock screen bypass vulnerability in GNOME Display Manager (gdm) versions prior to 3.18.2, affecting Fedora and other GNOME-based systems. This flaw allows a physically proximate attacker to bypass the lock screen by simply holding the Escape key. With a CVSS score of 7.2 (High), this vulnerability is easily exploitable with low attack complexity and no authentication required, leading to complete compromise of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. While there is no known active exploitation or publicly available exploit code in Metasploit or ExploitDB, the vulnerability has received some community attention and media coverage.

Impacted Technologies

VendorProductVersion(s)CPE
23CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:o:fedoraproject:fedora:23:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
<= 3.18.0CPE matchmatch criteria
cpe:2.3:a:gnome:gnome_display_manager:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

CVSS Data

CVSS version used by this source: 2.0

7.2HIGH

AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Confidentiality Impact
COMPLETE
Integrity Impact
COMPLETE
Availability Impact
COMPLETE
Access Vector
LOCAL
Access Complexity
LOW
Authentication
NONE
Exploitability Score
3.9
Impact Score
10.0
CvssVersion
2.0

Exploit Intelligence

EPSS Score
0.41%
Probability of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS Percentile
33.3%
Percentile rank of EPSS score among Peer Group
As of 2026-07-28
Model: v2026.06.15
This CVE's current EPSS score of 0.0041 is in the 46th percentile among its peer group of 3,241 CVEs.

Social Chatter

The average CVE in this peer group has 0.0 Twitter, 0.0 Reddit, 0.1 Bluesky, 0.0 Mastodon, and 0.5 GitHub mentions.

Media Mentions

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

Remediation

Patch Available

Vendor Patches (2)

redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: gdm-1:3.22.3-11.el7
View patch
redhatpatch availablevia redhat_api
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Fixed in: gnome-session-0:3.22.3-4.el7
View patch

Vendor Advisories (1)

redhatCVE-2015-7496Moderate

gdm: Crash when holding Escape in log screen

Nov 12, 2015

References

lists.fedoraproject.org / pipermail/package-announce/2015-November/172328.html
access.redhat.com / errata/RHSA-2017:2128
bugzilla.gnome.org / show_bug.cgi
download.gnome.org / sources/gdm/3.18/gdm-3.18.2.news
Patch
openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2015/11/17/10
openwall.com / lists/oss-security/2015/11/17/8