Samba-winbind: samba: pam_winbind mkhomedir chowns critical system paths without validation
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.1epss 0.1%
exploitation probability
0.1%top 99% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
A flaw was found in samba's pam_winbind. When mkhomedir is enabled, pam_winbind chowns the target account's home directory without validating the path is not a critical system directory such as /. On affected systems, accounts with / as their home directory (a common default for system accounts) can have this triggered not only by root, but by a non-root user holding a narrow sudo delegation to run commands as that account, causing ownership of / to change and resulting in severe denial of service (SSH, sudo, and package-manager failures). The change does not grant write access to / (which ships with restrictive 0555 permissions on RHEL), so the impact is availability loss rather than further privilege escalation.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
Affected products
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9References
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-15779https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2499991https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.19.4/nsswitch/pam_winbind.chttps://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.23.5/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1622https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.24.3/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1590