Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in cifs-utils Package by Red Hat

CVE-2026-12505

What is CVE-2026-12505?

A vulnerability exists in the cifs-utils package where the cifs.upcall helper does not securely drop its root privileges before accessing user information in a user-controlled environment. This flaw can be exploited by a low-privileged local attacker using a specially crafted request_key payload. The attacker can mislead the root-owned helper into entering a malicious namespace, leading to the execution of arbitrary commands with elevated privileges as the root user. As a result, this vulnerability poses a significant risk of complete system compromise.

References