Rclone is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. Insecure handling of symlinks with --links and --metadata in rclone while copying to local disk allows unprivileged users to indirectly modify ownership and permissions on symlink target files when a superuser or privileged process performs a copy. This vulnerability could enable privilege escalation and unauthorized access to critical system files, compromising system integrity, confidentiality, and availability. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.68.2.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Rclone is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage     providers. Insecure handling of symlinks with --links and --metadata in rclone while copying to local disk     allows unprivileged users to indirectly modify ownership and permissions on symlink target files when a     superuser or privileged process performs a copy. This vulnerability could enable privilege escalation and     unauthorized access to critical system files, compromising system integrity, confidentiality, and     availability. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.68.2. (CVE-2024-52522)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

The remote Fedora 41 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the FEDORA-2025-0620fdebb6 advisory.

    Fix for CVE-2024-52522 & CVE-2024-45338


Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The version of rclone installed on the remote macOS / Mac OS X host is prior to 1.68.2. It is, therefore, affected by a privilege escalation vulnerability due to insecure handling of symlinks with --links and --metadata while copying to local disk. This vulnerability could allow unprivileged users to indirectly modify ownership and permissions on symlink target files when a superuser or privileged process performs a copy. This vulnerability could enable privilege escalation and unauthorized access to critical system files (e.g., /etc/shadow), compromising system integrity, confidentiality, and availability. An unprivileged user can create a symlink to /etc/sudoers, /etc/shadow or similar and wait for a privileged user or process to copy/backup/mirror users data (using --links and --metadata) resulting in the unprivileged user now owning the file symlinked to.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
253394	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2024-52522	Nessus	Misc.	medium
214053	Fedora 41 : golang-github-aws-sdk-2 / golang-github-aws-smithy / etc (2025-0620fdebb6)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	medium
211735	RClone 1.59.x < 1.68.2 Privilege Escalation (macOS)	Nessus	MacOS X Local Security Checks	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2024-52522

medium

Tenable Plugins

medium

medium

medium