A flaw was found in the cifs-utils package where the cifs.upcall helper fails to securely drop its root privileges before looking up user…
CVE-2026-12505
A flaw was found in the cifs-utils package where the cifs.upcall helper fails to securely drop its root privileges before looking up user information inside a user-controlled environment. A local, low privileged attacker can exploit this by using a crafted requestkey payload to trick the root-owned helper into entering a custom environment (namespace) containing a malicious NSS module. This forces the system to load the attacker's controlled NSS Module and configuration, allowing them to execute arbitrary commands as the root user, elevating their privileges and fully compromising the system.
Assessment
- CVSS
- 7.8 (v3.1)
- Severity
- High
- EPSS
- 0.16% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Known exploited
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Exploit availability
- Nothing found in Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or public PoC repositories
- Published
- 18 June 2026
- Last updated
- 3 November 2026
- Affected
- Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.22
- Assigner
- redhat
CVSS vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
At the source
References
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:32990
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:39575
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:39576
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:44232
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-12505
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2489805
- https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git;a=commit;h=972c5b5ff95e3e812bc8daa72d0383654ab0dba7
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