Medium severity · published Jul 15, 2026
CVE-2026-15779
Samba-winbind: samba: pam_winbind mkhomedir chowns critical system paths without validation
6.1
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
A flaw was found in samba's pam_winbind. When mkhomedir is enabled, pam_winbind chowns the target account's home directory without validating the path is not a critical system directory such as /. On affected systems, accounts with / as their home directory (a common default for system accounts) can have this triggered not only by root, but by a non-root user holding a narrow sudo delegation to run commands as that account, causing ownership of / to change and resulting in severe denial of service (SSH, sudo, and package-manager failures). The change does not grant write access to / (which ships with restrictive 0555 permissions on RHEL), so the impact is availability loss rather than further privilege escalation.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 4% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-15779
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-15779
access.redhat.com
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-15779
bugzilla.redhat.com
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2499991
gitlab.com
https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.19.4/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c
gitlab.com
https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.23.5/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1622
gitlab.com
https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.24.3/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1590
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