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.
Get an AI-powered plain-language explanation of this vulnerability and remediation steps.
Login to generate AI explanationCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
5 reference(s) from NVD