PAN-OS: Temporary file race condition vulnerability in PAN-OS leads to local privilege escalation

Published 6 y ago 2020-05-13 · modified 4 mo ago 2026-06-17 · JSON

CVSS

7.0

v3.1 · CNA

CISA KEV

not known exploited

EPSS

0.6%

percentile 47%

Public exploits

none known

A race condition due to insecure creation of a file in a temporary directory vulnerability in PAN-OS allows for root privilege escalation from a limited linux user account. This allows an attacker who has escaped the restricted shell as a low privilege administrator, possibly by exploiting another vulnerability, to escalate privileges to become root user. This issue affects: PAN-OS 7.1 versions earlier than 7.1.26; PAN-OS 8.1 versions earlier than 8.1.13; PAN-OS 9.0 versions earlier than 9.0.6; All versions of PAN-OS 8.0.

Exploit prediction (EPSS)

0.57% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 47% of all scored CVEs.

CVSS scores

Assigned by	Version	Score	Vector
CNA	3.1	7.0	`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H`
CNA	3.1	7.0	`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H`
NVD	3.1	7.0	`CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H`
NVD	2.0	8.5	`AV:N/AC:M/Au:S/C:C/I:C/A:C`

Affected products

Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS

Classification

Weakness

CWE-377 DEPRECATED: Insecure Temporary File
CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization

Technology feeds

Palo Alto PAN-OS (RSS, critical only)

References

security.paloaltonetworks.com /CVE-2020-2016 · x_refsource_MISC, x_transferred

Sources

CVE List: CVE-2020-2016
NVD: CVE-2020-2016

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