What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-47274: pam_usb: Uncontrolled search path in pam_usb tools allows privilege escalation via PATH manipulation

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.3 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: 2026-05-27 · updated 2026-10-26
• Weakness: CWE-427

Description

pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. Prior to 0.9.0, multiple pam_usb helper tools resolved external binaries through the PATH environment variable rather than using absolute paths. An attacker who can influence the process environment during PAM authentication or tool execution could substitute malicious binaries. The affected tools are pamusb-check (src/tmux.c), pamusb-conf (tools/pamusb-conf), and pamusb-keyring-unlock-gnome (tools/pamusb-keyring-unlock-gnome). This vulnerability is fixed in 0.9.0.

Affected products

• mcdope pam_usb: before 0.9.0

References

• https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb/commit/1ee8745920388df48d001a8e61ba629071557937
• https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb/commit/52a1fd6413b7ffcc1a5b58ce432be42e7bf0dbd0
• https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb/commit/993e73d8bebb1d8e62677388de3402b6ec36b600
• https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb/security/advisories/GHSA-pp29-w28g-r9h9

Get alerted when CVE-2026-47274 or the next vulnerability affects your stack