CVE-2025-5791 — users
HIGHCVE-2025-5791 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.1) CWE-266 vulnerability in users. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
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
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-2025-5791 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
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
No patched version of users has shipped for CVE-2025-5791 yet. Where your build allows, override or pin the dependency away from the vulnerable range, and apply any maintainer-recommended mitigation.
Mitigate without a patch
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-2025-5791 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2025-5791. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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?
O3 Security finds CVE-2025-5791 across crates.io dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.