CVE-2025-14282 Dropbear: privilege escalation via unix domain socket forwardings
Authenticated users can escalate privileges to root by connecting to Unix domain sockets via SSH forwarding in multi-user mode.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-14282?
CVE-2025-14282 is a medium-severity vulnerability in https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/ dropbear, published on 12 Feb 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A flaw was found in Dropbear. When running in multi-user mode and authenticating users, the dropbear ssh server does the socket forwardings requested by the remote client as root, only switching to the logged-in user upon spawning a shell or performing some operations like reading the user's files. With the recent ability of also using unix domain sockets as the forwarding destination any user able to log in via ssh can connect to any unix socket with the root's credentials, bypassing both file system restrictions and any SO_PEERCRED / SO_PASSCRED checks performed by the peer.
Weakness: CWE-266
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-14282?
How do I fix CVE-2025-14282?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2025-14282 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-14282 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2025-14282, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-14282, DSA-6086-1, GHSA-xqcm-jrw9-wq72, UBUNTU-CVE-2025-14282.