CVE-2026-47270: medium-severity vulnerability in mcdope pam_usb
pam_usb: strtok() race condition in multi-threaded PAM hosts can corrupt deny_remote result
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.3epss 0.1%
pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. Prior to 0.9.0, pam_usb is a PAM module loaded into the host process (sudo, login, GDM, GNOME Shell). Display managers such as GDM run multiple concurrent authentication threads. Three functions used by the deny_remote feature called the non-reentrant strtok(), which stores state in a single global pointer. If two authentications race, one thread's strtok() call can overwrite the other's in-progress tokenisation pointer, causing incorrect parsing of the tmux session data or the /proc environ scan that backs the remote-session detection logic. Additionally, pusb_tmux_get_client_tty() passed the raw pointer returned by getenv(TMUX) directly to strtok(). getenv() returns a pointer into the live process environment block; strtok() inserts NUL bytes into that block, permanently corrupting the TMUX variable for subsequent code running in the same process. In long-lived display managers this affects all future authentications in that process. The combined effect can cause deny_remote=true to return an incorrect decision for a remote session, or an incorrect decision for a local session, depending on thread interleaving. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.9.0.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
Affected products
mcdope · pam_usbRelated CVEs — mcdope pam_usb
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-64669HIGHpam_usb: deny_remote bypassed by compressed IPv6 addresses in pusb_tmux_has_remote_clientsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-64668HIGHpam_usb: deny_remote bypassed by zone-indexed IPv6 addresses (fe80::1%eth0) in pusb_tmux_has_remote_clientsEPSS 0.4%CVE-2026-48064HIGHpam_usb: PAM_RHOST check skipped when deny_remote=false allows XDMCP authentication bypassEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-47269HIGHpam_usb: deny_remote feature incorrectly classifies IPv4-mapped IPv6 remote connections as localEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-47273MEDIUMpam_usb: XPath injection via PAM-supplied identifiers in pam_usb configuration queriesEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-44711HIGHpam_usb: Symlink attacks on pad directory and pad files enable authentication bypass and root file corruptionEPSS 0.2%