CVE-2026-48985
MEDIUM
MEDIUM
Priority: 0.01
BB Relevance:
36/100
Published: 2026-06-18
Modified: 2026-10-26
First seen: 2026-10-29
Status: active
Attack Surface
Low Complexity
No Interaction
CVSS Vector Breakdown
AV:
Local
AC:
Low
PR:
Low
UI:
None
S:
Unchanged
C:
None
I:
None
A:
High
Description
pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. In versions 0.9.1 and below, pusb_is_loginctl_local() can cause a NULL dereference crash when parsing loginctl output. The function calls popen() and reads the result; if the Remote field is only a newline, fgets() succeeds but strtok_r(buf, "\n", &saveptr) returns NULL. A subsequent strcmp(is_remote, "no") then dereferences NULL, causing undefined behavior (typically SIGSEGV) and crashing the PAM module. This can crash the authenticating process (e.g., sudo, login) and, depending on PAM stack configuration, deny access for all users of the affected service. This issue has been fixed in version 0.9.2.