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Uncontrolled Search Path (DLL Hijack)Weakness · CWE-427

CVE-2026-47274

MEDIUM · 6.3 CVSS v3.1 Published 2026-05-27
Patch available
A vendor patch is available. No clean upgrade release — apply the published patch.
See remediation →
65/100
Remediation priority · Elevated
Zero-click Patch available

Official description Straight from the sourceThe vendor's or NVD's own wording, published unedited. Authoritative, but often terse — it says what broke, rarely what to do.

NVD · unedited
pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary removable media. Prior to 0.9.0, multiple pam_usb helper tools resolved external binaries through the PATH environment variable rather than using absolute paths. An attacker who can influence the process environment during PAM authentication or tool execution could substitute malicious binaries. The affected tools are pamusb-check (src/tmux.c), pamusb-conf (tools/pamusb-conf), and pamusb-keyring-unlock-gnome (tools/pamusb-keyring-unlock-gnome). This vulnerability is fixed in 0.9.0.

Technical summary Written by usOur analysis, written from the advisory, the CVSS vector and the affected-version data. It adds context the advisory leaves out, and never invents facts that are not in the source.

dbcve analysis
How this class of weakness works · CWE-427

The program loads a library or executable from a location an attacker can influence — a writable directory early in the search order — so a malicious file is loaded with the application's privileges. On Windows this is the classic DLL-hijack. Remediation is loading only from fully-qualified trusted paths and controlling the search order explicitly.

General guidance for the uncontrolled search path (dll hijack) class — the official description and references above are authoritative for this specific CVE. Want a bespoke review and a reviewed fix? Ask our team →

CVSS breakdown How the score is builtThe industry scoring standard. It rates how the flaw is reached, what it takes to exploit, and what an attacker gains — the score is derived from those, not the other way round.

From the vector
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
High
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
None

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Remediation Closing itWhat it takes to close this. Where a vendor fix exists we point at it; where none exists we say so plainly, and can build one. Effort estimates are scoped from the advisory, not from your codebase.

dbcve · scoped
Patch available Apply the vendor patch
Vendor patch github.com →
Recommended fix High confidence

0.9.0

  1. 1. Identify the current installed version of pam_usb using your package manager or by checking the binary version (e.g., pamusb-check --version).
  2. 2. Upgrade pam_usb to version 0.9.0 or later. For source compilation, download the 0.9.0 release from the GitHub repository (e.g., https://github.com/mcdope/pam_usb/releases/tag/v0.9.0) and rebuild.
  3. 3. If using a distribution package manager (apt, yum, dnf, pacman, etc.), check if version 0.9.0 is available. If not, consider building from source or waiting for your distribution to package the update.
  4. 4. After upgrading, verify that the affected helper tools (pamusb-check, pamusb-conf, pamusb-keyring-unlock-gnome) no longer rely on PATH for external binary resolution by reviewing the source code changes in commit 1ee8745.

Generated from the published advisory — verify against the referenced sources before acting.

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References Go to the primary sourcePrimary sources — vendor advisories, patches and trackers. Where our summary and a reference disagree, the reference wins.

Primary sources

Practitioner notes

Contributed

Peer-ranked notes from engineers who’ve handled CVE-2026-47274 in production — separate from our analysis above.

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