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CVE-2026-15779

MEDIUM 6.1

Published 2026-07-15 · Last modified 2026-07-15

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.

NO EXPLOITATION SIGNALS

No known exploitation, public exploit, or elevated probability at this time. Track for changes.

Exploitation likelihood

0.1%chance of exploitation in 30 days · 1st percentile

○ In CISA KEV ○ Public exploit / PoC

Impact if exploited

6.1CVSS 3.1 · MEDIUM

  • ConfidentialityNone
  • IntegrityLow
  • AvailabilityHigh

What an attacker needs

  • ⚠Access: Requires local access to the host
  • ⚠Privileges: Requires a low-privilege account
  • ✓User interaction: No user interaction needed
  • ✓Complexity: No special conditions — reliably repeatable

✓ lowers the bar for an attacker · ⚠ raises it

Proof of concept & exploit code

Test against your own equipment

curl -s https://vulnpedia.com/cve/CVE-2026-15779/poc.jsonMachine-readable PoC index for this CVE (for automation).

Listed for defensive triage, patch verification, and authorized testing on systems you own. Machine-readable: /cve/CVE-2026-15779/poc.json

Affected

Vendors Red Hat

Products Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Weakness (CWE)

  • CWE-732: Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

All CVSS metrics

  • MEDIUM 6.1 v3.1 · CNA Primary
    CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
  • MEDIUM 6.1 v3.1 · NVD Secondary
    CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H

References

Technical & other

Sources: NVD · CVE.org · EPSS