
Looney Tunables- A High Severity Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in GNU C Library Aka glibc- CVE-2023-4911
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) recently disclosed a high-severity vulnerability in GNU C Library aka glibc that could allow a local attacker to gain root privileges. This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4911 and nicknamed “Looney Tunables”, has been given a CVSS score of 7.8 making it a critical security issue that needs immediate attention. In this blog post, we will take a look into this vulnerability – its origins, impact, and the steps you need to take to patch this vulnerability on Linux systems using glibc. A Short Note About GNU C Library The GNU C Library or glibc provides core OS functionality like memory allocation, input/output operations, and thread handling required by most programs on a Linux system. A key component of glibc is the dynamic loader (ld.so) which loads the required shared libraries and…