Is CVE-2026-48981 exploited in the wild?

No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-48981 being exploited in the wild.

How severe is CVE-2026-48981?

Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6.7, published 18 June 2026.

Is there a fix for CVE-2026-48981?

A patch was published on 2023-05-23: Version 0.9.2 released Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.

How is CVE-2026-48981 attacked?

It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.

Am I affected by CVE-2026-48981?

Check whether you run Mcdope Pam Usb 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.

CVE-2026-48981: mcdope pam_usb XXE in configuration file parsing

CVE-2026-48981 · Severity: medium · CVSS 6.7 · Published 2026-06-18

pam_usb is a tool that allows users to log into Linux systems using a USB drive instead of a password. A security flaw in how it reads its configuration file could allow an attacker who already has high-level access to the system to read sensitive local files or trigger unauthorized network connections. This is particularly serious because the software runs with elevated system privileges during the login process.

Technologies: Mcdope Pam Usb. Vendors: Mcdope.

Quick answers

Is CVE-2026-48981 exploited in the wild?: No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-48981 being exploited in the wild.
How severe is CVE-2026-48981?: Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 6.7, published 18 June 2026.
Which products and versions are affected?: Mcdope Pam Usb < 0.9.2.
Is there a fix for CVE-2026-48981?: A patch was published on 2023-05-23: Version 0.9.2 released Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
How is CVE-2026-48981 attacked?: It is attacked with local access, in an operating system.
Am I affected by CVE-2026-48981?: Check whether you run Mcdope Pam Usb 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

The pam_usb module fails to disable external entity expansion when calling libxml2's xmlReadFile() function, using flags=0. This leads to an XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability. An attacker with write access to the root-owned pam_usb.conf can insert malicious entity references. Because pam_usb.so is executed within privileged setuid contexts (such as sudo or su), this allows for the reading of sensitive local files or the initiation of outbound network requests from a highly privileged process. The issue is resolved in version 0.9.2 by passing explicit parser flags to block external entity expansion.

Affected products

mcdope pam_usb < 0.9.2

Timeline

2023-05-23: patched: Version 0.9.2 released
2026-05-24: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory published
2026-06-18: disclosed: CVE-2026-48981 published to NVD

References

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