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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.4

CVE-2025-14282 json

Dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings

published 2026-02-12 8 mo ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2025-207001

cvss
5.4
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 34%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A flaw was found in Dropbear. When running in multi-user mode and authenticating users, the dropbear ssh server does the socket forwardings requested by the remote client as root, only switching to the logged-in user upon spawning a shell or performing some operations like reading the user's files. With the recent ability of also using unix domain sockets as the forwarding destination any user able to log in via ssh can connect to any unix socket with the root's credentials, bypassing both file system restrictions and any SO_PEERCRED / SO_PASSCRED checks performed by the peer.

Patch / fix

  • https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/ dropbear 2025.88
  • dropbear Debian 13 2025.89-1~deb13u1
  • dropbear Debian 14 2025.89-1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2025-14282

  • dropbear Alpine 3.24 2025.89-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2025-14282

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-14282 updated cvss 5.4

dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
8 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.40% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 5.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

Affected products

  • https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/ dropbear

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-266 Incorrect Privilege Assignment

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.