CVE-2026-48984: medium-severity vulnerability in mcdope pam_usb
pam_usb: xfree() does not call explicit_bzero — sensitive cryptographic material may linger in freed heap
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 4.7epss 0.1%
pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. In versions 0.9.1 and below, the xfree() memory release helper in calls free() without first zeroing the buffer contents, releasing heap-allocated buffers containing sensitive data — including one-time pad bytes read from disk — without clearing, leaving the sensitive content in freed heap memory until it happens to be overwritten by a subsequent allocation. On a system where a use-after-free condition exists, or where a heap inspection primitive becomes available, this could allow recovery of pad values or other authentication material from freed memory regions. This is a defence-in-depth requirement consistent with prior hardening work in this codebase (GHSA-vx6f-rrqr-j87c applied explicit_bzero to some pad paths; this issue generalises the pattern to the central deallocation helper).
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/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%