🛡️ CVE-2018-7408 — npm

🟠 CVSS 8.0 — High ✅ No Known Exploit CWE-732 OSV
8.0
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource in NPM

An issue was discovered in an npm 5.7.0 2018-02-21 pre-release (marked as "next: 5.7.0" and therefore automatically installed by an "npm upgrade -g npm" command, and also announced in the vendor's blog without mention of pre-release status). It might allow local users to bypass intended filesystem access restrictions because ownerships of /etc and /usr directories are being changed unexpectedly, related to a "correctMkdir" issue.

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached with local access to the system, attack complexity is low, an attacker needs low-level privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. The scope is unchanged, so the impact stays within the vulnerable component. Rated impact: confidentiality high, integrity high, availability high.

Weakness class

CVE-2018-7408 is classified as CWE-732: Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource. A sensitive resource is assigned permissions that let unintended actors read or modify it.

Affected software

CVE-2018-7408 is recorded against 1 package.

  • npm

Timeline and source

Published on 13 May 2022 and last revised on 4 February 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. Record sourced from OSV.

References

nvd.nist.gov (Advisory)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Web)
github.com (Package)
blog.npmjs.org (Web)

Details

Severity HIGH
CVSS Score 8.0
CVSS Vector CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CWE CWE-732
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source OSV
Published 2022-05-13
Updated 2026-08-12
Modified 2026-02-04
Fix URL N/A

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
npm — —

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