Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-44941 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-44941 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-44941?
- High severity, with a CVSS score of 8.4, published 2 July 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Suse Libzypp before 17.38.12.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-44941?
- A patch was published on 2026-06-05: Fix committed to libzypp repository and submitted to OBS Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-44941 attacked?
- It is attacked over the network, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-44941?
- Check whether you run Suse Libzypp at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
A relative path traversal vulnerability exists in the 'keyhint' option within the repomd.xml parsing logic of libzypp. The 'RepomdFileReader::keyhints()' function used a regular expression that failed to validate or sanitize path separators and '..' segments in the key filename. An attacker providing a malicious repository can use these traversal sequences to write files outside the intended metadata cache. By overwriting sensitive files like /etc/ld.so.preload, an attacker can achieve arbitrary code execution as root. This exploit can be triggered during a 'zypper refresh' operation and occurs before the user is prompted to trust the repository's signing key. The issue is fixed in libzypp version 17.38.12 by updating the regex to reject path separators in keyhints.
Affected products
- SUSE libzypp before 17.38.12
Timeline
- 2026-06-03: disclosed: Vulnerability reported by Trung Nguyen of CyStack
- 2026-06-05: patched: Fix committed to libzypp repository and submitted to OBS
- 2026-07-02: advisory: CVE-2026-44941 published