Authentication Bypass Flaw Affects GRUB on UEFI Systems

CVE-2023-4001

Summary

An authentication bypass flaw was found in GRUB due to the way that GRUB uses the UUID of a device to search for the configuration file that contains the password hash for the GRUB password protection feature. An attacker capable of attaching an external drive such as a USB stick containing a file system with a duplicate UUID (the same as in the "/boot/" file system) can bypass the GRUB password protection feature on UEFI systems, which enumerate removable drives before non-removable ones. This issue was introduced in a downstream patch in Red Hat's version of grub2 and does not affect the upstream package.

News Articles

Penetration Testing

CVE-2023-4001CVE-2023-45849

Bypassing GRUB Security: How CVE-2023-4001 Exploits UEFI Systems

CVE-2023-4001 is an authentication bypass flaw in GRUB. GRUB is the gatekeeper of the booting process in many UEFI-based computers

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