Executive brief
A security flaw in Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a system monitoring toolkit, allows an attacker who has already gained limited access to take full control of the system. By exploiting an unsecured internal connection within the monitoring software, an attacker can bypass security boundaries to execute commands with administrative (root) privileges. This could lead to a complete system takeover, data theft, or permanent disruption of services on affected Linux servers and OpenShift clusters.
Technical details
A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) linux_sockets Performance Metrics Domain Agent (PMDA). When the PMDA is loaded as a Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) within the Performance Metrics Collector Daemon (PMCD), it fails to set the O_CLOEXEC flag on the pmdarootfd Unix socket connection. This causes child processes spawned via popen() to inherit the file descriptor. An attacker who has achieved initial code execution (e.g., via command injection in the linux_sockets module) can use this inherited descriptor to send a PDUROOT_STARTPMDA_REQ to the pmdaroot process. Because pmdaroot runs as root and lacks per-request authentication, it will execute attacker-controlled arguments via execvp(), resulting in full root privilege escalation.
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
Timeline
- 2026-07-22: disclosed: Reported via Red Hat Bugzilla
- 2026-07-30: advisory: NVD publication date