CVE-2025-14282CWE-266

Dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings

Medium · published February 12, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.4
EPSS
0%
Percentile
33.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.4 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00405 · 33.7th percentile
Weakness
CWE-266 · Incorrect Privilege Assignment
Published
2026-02-12T21:37Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 12 FEB 21:37Z
    Dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings
    cvelistv5