CVE-2021-21703: high-severity vulnerability in PHP
PHP-FPM memory access in root process leading to privilege escalation
Published · Updated
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.8epss 1.4%
In PHP versions 7.3.x up to and including 7.3.31, 7.4.x below 7.4.25 and 8.0.x below 8.0.12, when running PHP FPM SAPI with main FPM daemon process running as root and child worker processes running as lower-privileged users, it is possible for the child processes to access memory shared with the main process and write to it, modifying it in a way that would cause the root process to conduct invalid memory reads and writes, which can be used to escalate privileges from local unprivileged user to the root user.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
PHP Group · PHPRelated CVEs — PHP
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-109619CRITICALRCE via stale global stateEPSS 100.0%KEVCVE-2026-109618CRITICALRCE via OOM corruptionEPSS 100.0%KEVCVE-2024-4577CRITICALArgument Injection in PHP-CGIEPSS 100.0%KEVCVE-2022-31626HIGHmysqlnd/pdo password buffer overflowEPSS 58.1%CVE-2022-31629MEDIUM$_COOKIE names string replacement (. -> _): cookie integrity vulnerabilitiesEPSS 49.6%CVE-2024-2756MEDIUM__Host-/__Secure- cookie bypass due to partial CVE-2022-31629 fixEPSS 38.1%
References
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=81026https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/10/msg00021.htmlhttps://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6PZVLICZUJMXOGWOUWSBAEGIVTF6Y6V3/https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/JO5RA6YOBGGGKLIA6F6BQRZDDECF5L3R/https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PBM3KKB3RY2YPOKNMC4HIH7IH3T3WC74/https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202209-20https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20211118-0003/https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4992https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4993https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2022.htmlhttps://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpujan2022.htmlhttp://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2021/10/26/7