CVE-2025-6018

unknown

Published — · Modified —

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CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

1.0

Description

A Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) vulnerability has been discovered in pam-config within Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). This flaw allows an unprivileged local attacker (for example, a user logged in via SSH) to obtain the elevated privileges normally reserved for a physically present, "allow_active" user. The highest risk is that the attacker can then perform all allow_active yes Polkit actions, which are typically restricted to console users, potentially gaining unauthorized control over system configurations, services, or other sensitive operations.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-52386 local linux

İbrahimsql · 2025-07-28

Linux PAM Environment - Variable Injection Local Privilege Escalation

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`0`
sid	Fixed	`0`
forky	Fixed	`0`
bullseye	Fixed	`0`
bookworm	Fixed	`0`

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.