CVE-2024-10041: 
Rocky Linux vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2024-10041 is a vulnerability discovered in PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) that was disclosed on October 23, 2024. The vulnerability affects Linux-PAM implementations across various Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian systems. The issue has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 4.7 (Medium) (NVD, Red Hat).

The vulnerability exists in PAM where secret information is stored in memory, allowing an attacker to trigger the victim program to execute by sending characters to its standard input (stdin). During this process, the attacker can train the branch predictor to execute an ROP (Return-Oriented Programming) chain speculatively. The attack requires specific conditions: finding a gadget chain in mapped executable memory, triggering TLB entries for prefetching, and breaking ASLR using Spectre techniques (Red Hat Bugzilla).

If successfully exploited, this vulnerability could result in the disclosure of sensitive information, specifically leaked passwords such as those found in /etc/shadow while performing authentications. The attack could potentially expose hashed password data to unauthorized users (NVD).

Multiple vendors have released security updates to address this vulnerability. Red Hat has released fixes through several security advisories including RHSA-2024:11250 for RHEL 9, RHSA-2024:10379 for RHEL 8, and RHSA-2024:9941 for RHEL 9.4 Extended Update Support. Ubuntu and Debian have also acknowledged the vulnerability and are working on fixes (Red Hat, Ubuntu).