What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-14282: Dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.4 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-02-12 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-266

Description

A flaw was found in Dropbear. When running in multi-user mode and authenticating users, the dropbear ssh server does the socket forwardings requested by the remote client as root, only switching to the logged-in user upon spawning a shell or performing some operations like reading the user's files. With the recent ability of also using unix domain sockets as the forwarding destination any user able to log in via ssh can connect to any unix socket with the root's credentials, bypassing both file system restrictions and any SO_PEERCRED / SO_PASSCRED checks performed by the peer.

Affected products

• https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/ dropbear: from 2024.84 before 2025.88 — fixed in 2025.88

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/ dropbear 2025.88. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-14282
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2420052
• https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/pull/391
• https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/pull/394
• https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/dropbear/2025q4/002390.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/12/16/4
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/12/17/1

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