CVE-2025-5791 — users
HIGHCVE-2025-5791 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.1) CWE-266 vulnerability in users. The records list no fixed version yet; check the vendor advisory below and apply the mitigations in the meantime.
users may append `root` to group listings
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2025-5791.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
usersReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects crates.io packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Affected versions append root to group listings, unless the correct listing has exactly 1024 groups.
This affects both:
- The supplementary groups of a user
- The group access list of the current process
If the caller uses this information for access control, this may lead to privilege escalation.
This crate is not currently maintained, so a patched version is not available.
Versions older than 0.8.0 do not contain the affected functions, so downgrading to them is a workaround.
Recommended alternatives
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦀crates.io | users | ≥ 0.8.0 | No fix |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for users, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Remediation status
The records we use list no patched version of users for CVE-2025-5791. Check the maintainer's advisory, and where your build allows, override or pin the dependency away from the vulnerable range.
Mitigate without a patch
Close the privilege gap rather than the entry point: audit which accounts, roles and service identities can reach the affected operation, drop the component to the least privilege it actually needs, and review file and directory permissions created by earlier installs — a default left in place is what makes this reachable.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
This vulnerability is rated as an important severity because a flaw in the users crate for Rust allows local privilege escalation. Specifically, when a user or process belongs to fewer than exactly 1024 groups, the crate’s group listing logic incorrectly includes the root group in the access list. This erroneous…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.1 | openshift-sandboxed-containers/osc-rhel9-operator:1.10-1753885668 | RHSA-2025:12359 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2025-5791 in your dependencies?
Find it across crates.io, including transitive dependencies.