Executive brief
A security vulnerability has been identified in Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a system monitoring toolkit used in various Linux distributions. An attacker with local access to the system can exploit a flaw in how the software handles network socket filters to run unauthorized commands. This could allow a malicious user to gain higher privileges, access sensitive data, or disrupt system operations.
Technical details
A command injection vulnerability exists in the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) linux_sockets Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA). The root cause is a logic error in the sockets_check_filter() validation helper, which returns 1 for safe input and 0 for unsafe input; however, the store handler incorrectly inverts this check, rejecting safe expressions and accepting malicious ones containing shell metacharacters. An attacker can provide a crafted value to the network.persocket.filter metric, which is subsequently executed via popen() as the PMDA process user when metrics refresh. Exploitation requires the linux_sockets PMDA to be loaded and the 'ss' binary to be present on the system.
Affected products
- Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 affected
- Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 affected
- Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 affected
- Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 affected
- Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 affected
- PCP Performance Co-Pilot (PCP)
Timeline
- 2026-07-22: disclosed: Initial report in Red Hat Bugzilla
- 2026-07-30: advisory: NVD and Red Hat published advisory details