CVE-2026-28372

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 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: yes
Published: 2026-02-27 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-829

Description

telnetd in GNU inetutils through 2.7 allows privilege escalation that can be exploited by abusing systemd service credentials support added to the login(1) implementation of util-linux in release 2.40. This is related to client control over the CREDENTIALS_DIRECTORY environment variable, and requires an unprivileged local user to create a login.noauth file.

Affected products

GNU inetutils: through 2.7

References

https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/pkgs/inetutils.git/commit/?id=3953943d8296310485f98963883a798545ab9a6c
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-02/msg00000.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2026-02/msg00012.html
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/02/24/1
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/02/27/3
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/06/2
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/06/3
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/07/1
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/03/07/2

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