CVE-2026-15779
Description
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.
How to fix CVE-2026-15779
No fixed version has been published yet. Mitigate by removing the affected package or applying upstream guidance from the references below.
- —no fix listed
Is CVE-2026-15779 being exploited?
Low — EPSS is 0.1%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.
Affected packages (1)
- from 0
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | MEDIUM6.1 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H |