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Case File

CVE-2020-8903

HIGH · CVSS 7.8 EPSS 0.32% Public Exploit

Source: NVD + CISA KEV + EPSS (historical backfill) · Published 2020-06-22 · Last synced 2026-08-04

CyberRota Analysis

AI analysis pending.

Public Exploit Signal

A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.

GitHub PoC Links

Note: these links are listed for security research and verification purposes only.

CVE
CVE-2020-8903
Severity
HIGH
CVSS
7.8
EPSS
0.32%

Original NVD Description

A vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform's guest-oslogin versions between 20190304 and 20200507 allows a user that is only granted the role "roles/compute.osLogin" to escalate privileges to root. Using their membership to the "adm" group, users with this role are able to read the DHCP XID from the systemd journal. Using the DHCP XID, it is then possible to set the IP address and hostname of the instance to any value, which is then stored in /etc/hosts. An attacker can then point metadata.google.internal to an arbitrary IP address and impersonate the GCE metadata server which make it is possible to instruct the OS Login PAM module to grant administrative privileges. All images created after 2020-May-07 (20200507) are fixed, and if you cannot update, we recommend you edit /etc/group/security.conf and remove the "adm" user from the OS Login entry.