Major Cryptsetup Vulnerability Affects Some LUKS-Encrypted GNU/Linux Systems

Cryptsetup is a command-line utility designed for setting up a new dm-crypt device in LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) encryption mode, a.k.a. disk encryption, on a Linux-based operating system. The recently discovered vulnerability appears to exist in the scripts that are used by the Cryptsetup utility to unlock the LUKS-encrypted system partition. As the vulnerability does not appear to depend on a certain configuration or system, it affects numerous GNU/Linux distributions based on Debian, SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including the popular Ubuntu and Fedora, allowing an attacker to access the root initramfs shell on the affected system, or remotely exploit cloud environments.