7.5

CVE-2021-3978: cloudflare octorpki Improper Privilege Management

CVSS: 7.5v3.1HighAnalyzed
AliasesUBUNTU-CVE-2021-3978DEBIAN-CVE-2021-3978GHSA-3pqh-p72c-fj85
Published 29-01-2025Last modified 12-02-2025
Open JSON

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2021-3978 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in cloudflare octorpki. EPSS estimates a 0.14% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 3.3% of scored vulnerabilities.

Overall risk
30/100
0100
Medium · default modelHow is this calculated?
CVSS score
7.5/10
010
High · v3.1 (CVE.org)
EPSS score
0.14%
0%100%
Low · 0.00 pp in 30 days
KEVNot listedIn no KEV catalog
RansomwareNone recordedNo known use recorded
Public exploits0No public exploits recorded

Advisory lineage

Upstream 0 · Downstream 1
DSA-5041-1

Timeline

  1. 29-01-2025
    PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
  2. 12-02-2025
    Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

When copying files with rsync, octorpki uses the "-a" flag 0, which forces rsync to copy binaries with the suid bit set as root. Since the provided service definition defaults to root ( https://github.com/cloudflare/cfrpki/blob/master/package/octorpki.service ) this could allow for a vector, when combined with another vulnerability that causes octorpki to process a malicious TAL file, for a local privilege escalation.

CVSS metrics

5 scores · 5 sources · 1 version

EPSS trend

Probability

0.14%

Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days

Percentile

3%

Versus all other CVEs

30-day change

0.00 pp

From 0.14% on 19-09-2026

19-09-202619-10-2026
EPSS score
0.14%

Known exploited

Compare KEV catalogs

Not in any of the 3 tracked catalogs.

Public exploits

0 found

No public exploits indexed.

Weaknesses

CWE · root cause

Affected systems

Cloudflare1 product
Debian1 product
  • cfrpki< 1.4.2-1
Github.com/cloudflare1 product
  • cfrpki< 1.4.2
Ubuntu1 product
  • cfrpki< 1.4.2-1

4 vendors · 4 products

References

6 links