That’s not good news for administrators, but it’s not good news for users either. The vulnerability known as the dirty pipe is probably the most serious in unpatched Linux systems and derivatives at the moment – and it also affects current Android smartphones or other devices that use the corresponding Linux kernel.
Security researchers say it’s the worst vulnerability in 6 years, when Dirty Cow allowed Android smartphones to be rooted, which numerous apps exploited at the time. Dirty Pipe works in a similar way but is easier to exploit. Dirty Pipe is listed under CVE-2022-0847.
Several things can be done by an attacker, including creating a user with no privileges, but who could then use a bash script to allow anyone to overwrite data in any read-only file. According to the researchers, the vulnerability should be found in kernels 5.8, 5.16.11, 5.15.25 and 5.10.102 then close again.