What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-79920: Ajenti: Privilege escalation to root via unauthenticated/unauthorized plugin install task

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.9 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-21 · updated 2026-09-24
• Weakness: CWE-862

Description

Ajenti is a Linux & BSD modular server admin panel. Prior to version 2.2.16, any authenticated user can call /api/core/tasks/start to enqueue InstallPlugin, UnInstallPlugin, or UpgradeAll from plugins/plugins/tasks.py without plugin-management authorization. InstallPlugin and UnInstallPlugin construct a pip package specification from unvalidated name and version fields, and the task worker invokes pip while running as root. A low-privileged user can therefore select or manipulate a package installed with root privileges and can install, remove, or upgrade plugins without administrative permission, resulting in root code execution and full host compromise. This issue is fixed in version 2.2.16.

Affected products

• ajenti: before 2.2.16

References

• https://github.com/ajenti/ajenti/commit/3a8cbee32df4c5033796f19af4210011163a6f6e
• https://github.com/ajenti/ajenti/commit/f07f02e0cdeeb3e528c1d5af28e27fd11623c49c
• https://github.com/ajenti/ajenti/releases/tag/v2.2.16
• https://github.com/ajenti/ajenti/security/advisories/GHSA-j8xf-5fw2-f99q

Get alerted when CVE-2026-79920 or the next vulnerability affects your stack