What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-19624: NetworkManager-l2tp: local privilege escalation via ipsec.conf injection

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-14 · updated 2026-09-18
• Weakness: CWE-88

Description

A flaw was found in NetworkManager-l2tp. The plugin writes attacker-controlled VPN connection properties (vpn.data and vpn.secrets values) unescaped into a generated ipsec.conf file that pluto loads as root. A local unprivileged user can create and activate their own L2TP VPN profile containing a newline-injected leftupdown directive; pluto executes that command as root when the IKE security association is established, resulting in local privilege escalation. This is the same bug class as CVE-2018-10900 (NetworkManager-vpnc).

Affected products

• Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL): from 1.20.0 before 1.20.24 — fixed in 1.20.24
• Fedora: from 1.52.0 before 1.52.4 — fixed in 1.52.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) 1.20.24; Fedora 1.52.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?packages=NetworkManager-l2tp
• https://github.com/nm-l2tp/NetworkManager-l2tp/commit/3704d8c9d5e5f9ed1626a8ce7627a04247cea673
• https://github.com/nm-l2tp/NetworkManager-l2tp/commit/95b6b46f48a0c9eabc79272cd313f219110ef91c
• https://github.com/nm-l2tp/NetworkManager-l2tp/releases
• https://linnemanlabs.com/posts/nm-l2tp-newline-to-root/

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