needrestart 0.8 through 3.5 before 3.6 is prone to local privilege escalation. Regexes to detect the Perl, Python, and Ruby interpreters are not anchored, allowing a local user to escalate privileges when needrestart tries to detect if interpreters are using old source files.

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, passes unsanitized data to a library (Modules::ScanDeps) which expects safe input. This could allow a local attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands. Please see the related CVE-2024-10224 in Modules::ScanDeps.

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by tricking needrestart into running the Python interpreter with an attacker-controlled PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by winning a race condition and tricking needrestart into running their own, fake Python interpreter (instead of the system's real Python interpreter). The initial security fix (6ce6136) introduced a regression which was subsequently resolved (42af5d3).

Qualys discovered that needrestart, before version 3.8, allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code as root by tricking needrestart into running the Ruby interpreter with an attacker-controlled RUBYLIB environment variable.