Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-48986 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-48986 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-48986?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 4.7, published 18 June 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Mcdope Pam Usb <= 0.9.1.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-48986?
- A patch was published on 2026-05-23: Version 0.9.2 released Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-48986 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-48986?
- 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
An infinite loop vulnerability (CWE-835) exists in pam_usb's process-tree walking logic. The function `usb_get_process_parent_id()` fails to initialize the parent PID pointer on failure. In `pusb_local_login()`, the same variable is used for both input and output in a while loop; if a parent process exits during authentication, `/proc/<pid>/stat` becomes unreadable, causing the function to fail without updating the PID. This results in the loop condition never being met, hanging the PAM-aware process (e.g., sshd, sudo). The issue is fixed in version 0.9.2 by ensuring the PID is initialized to zero on failure.
Affected products
- mcdope pam_usb <= 0.9.1
Timeline
- 2026-05-23: patched: Version 0.9.2 released
- 2026-05-24: advisory: GitHub Security Advisory published
- 2026-06-18: disclosed: CVE published to NVD