Vulnerability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

CVE-2026-15779

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.

EPSS: 0.001 (1.1th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.1 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-15779?
CVE-2026-15779 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, classified under Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource. CVSS score: 6.1/10. Published 2026-07-15.
How severe is CVE-2026-15779?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.1 out of 10.