CVE-2018-1196: Symlink privilege escalation attack via Spring Boot launch script

Spring Boot supports an embedded launch script that can be used to easily run the application as a systemd or init.d linux service. The script included with Spring Boot is susceptible to a symlink attack which allows the run_user to overwrite and take ownership of any file on the same system. In order to instigate the attack, the application must be installed as a service and the run_user requires shell access to the server.