SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAnalyzed

CVE-2026-5398

A malicious process can abuse the dangling pointer to grant itself root privileges.

HIGH 8.4EPSS 0.17%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.17%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

The implementation of TIOCNOTTY failed to clear a back-pointer from the structure representing the controlling terminal to the calling process' session. If the invoking process then exits, the terminal structure may end up containing a pointer to freed memory. A malicious process can abuse the dangling pointer to grant itself root privileges.

CVSS 3.1
8.4 HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS
0.17% probability · 6th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-416
Affected
freebsd/freebsd
Source
secteam@freebsd.org

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.