CVE-2018-12027 — passenger
HIGHCVE-2018-12027 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) Information Exposure vulnerability in passenger. A fix is available for passenger — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Insecure Permissions in Phusion Passenger
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2018-12027 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
passengerReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects RubyGems packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
An Insecure Permissions vulnerability in SpawningKit in Phusion Passenger 5.3.x before 5.3.2 causes information disclosure in the following situation: given a Passenger-spawned application process that reports that it listens on a certain Unix domain socket, if any of the parent directories of said socket are writable by a normal user that is not the application's user, then that non-application user can swap that directory with something else, resulting in traffic being redirected to a non-application user's process through an alternative Unix domain socket.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💎RubyGems | passenger | ≥ 5.3.0&&< 5.3.2 | 5.3.2bundle update passenger --conservative |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for passenger, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update passenger to 5.3.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2018-12027 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2018-12027 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2018-12027. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2018-12027 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2018-12027 across RubyGems dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.