CVE-2026-48981

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Source

https://cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-48981

Import Source

https://storage.googleapis.com/cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2026-48981.json

JSON Data

https://api.osv.dev/v1/vulns/CVE-2026-48981

Aliases

GHSA-96vv-r4wc-28c2

Published

2026-06-18T18:55:58.485Z

Modified

2026-07-08T08:12:35.622090709Z

Severity

6.7 (Medium) CVSS_V3 - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:L CVSS Calculator

Summary

pam_usb: xmlReadFile flags=0 permits XXE network entity fetching in conf.c

Details

pamusb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. In versions prior to 0.9.2, pamusb calls xmlReadFile() with flags=0 when loading the configuration file, allowing libxml2 to process external entity references (XXE), potentially making outbound network connections or local file reads at XML parse time from the context of the authenticating process. The vulnerability requires the configuration file to contain crafted XML entity references. Since pamusb.conf is root-owned, direct exploitation requires prior write access to the config, but the defence-in-depth impact is significant given that pamusb.so runs in setuid contexts (sudo, su). This issue has been fixed in version 0.9.2.

Database specific

{
    "osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/48xxx/CVE-2026-48981.json",
    "cna_assigner": "GitHub_M",
    "cwe_ids": [
        "CWE-611"
    ]
}

References

Affected packages

Git / github.com/mcdope/pam_usb

Affected ranges

Type

GIT

Repo

https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb

Events

Introduced

Fixed

d4083e266b7e18e41e58b3392b5856941a3b5b1c

Database specific

{
    "source": [
        "AFFECTED_FIELD",
        "REFERENCES"
    ],
    "extracted_events": [
        {
            "introduced": "0"
        },
        {
            "fixed": "0.9.2"
        }
    ]
}

Affected versions

0.*

0.5.0

0.7.1

0.7.2

0.7.3

0.8.3

0.8.4

0.8.7

0.9.0

0.9.1

v0.*

v0.7.0

v0.8.0

Database specific

source

"https://storage.googleapis.com/cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2026-48981.json"