CVE-2025-54389: 
Alibaba Cloud Linux (Aliyun Linux) vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-54389 affects AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) versions prior to 0.19.2. The vulnerability was discovered by Rajesh Pangare and disclosed on August 14, 2025. It is an improper output neutralization vulnerability that allows attackers to craft malicious filenames containing terminal escape sequences to manipulate AIDE's report and log output (GitHub Advisory, NVD).

The vulnerability stems from missing output neutralization before printing filenames, symbolic link targets, or extended attribute key names to the report and log output. This allows users to include control characters in these fields to tamper with or overwrite previous output. The vulnerability has received a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.2 (Medium) with the vector string CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N, indicating local attack vector, low attack complexity, no privileges required, and high impact on integrity (GitHub Advisory, NVD).

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to hide the addition or removal of files from AIDE's report and tamper with the log output. This could allow a local user to bypass AIDE's detection of malicious files, effectively compromising the integrity of the intrusion detection system (GitHub Advisory).

The primary mitigation is to upgrade to AIDE version 0.19.2 which patches this vulnerability. For users unable to upgrade, alternative workarounds include configuring AIDE to write the report output to a regular file (e.g., report_url=file:/var/log/aide.log), redirecting stdout to a regular file, or redirecting the log output written to stderr to a regular file. When viewing these files, it's important to use a program that properly escapes terminal sequences (GitHub Advisory, GitHub Release).