CVE-2026-79655

Publication date 25 August 2026

Last updated 18 September 2026

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

A flaw was found in sos clean, a utility within the sos package. This vulnerability allows a local attacker to perform arbitrary file creation or overwrite. By crafting a malicious tar archive, an attacker can exploit a path traversal issue during tar extraction, where symlink and hardlink targets are not properly validated. This enables the attacker to write files to arbitrary locations on the system with the privileges of the sos clean process, which often runs as root.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
sos	26.04 LTS resolute	Needs evaluation
	24.04 LTS noble	Not in release
	22.04 LTS jammy	Not in release
sosreport	26.04 LTS resolute	Not in release
	24.04 LTS noble	Vulnerable, fix deferred
	22.04 LTS jammy	Vulnerable, fix deferred
	20.04 LTS focal	Vulnerable, fix deferred
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable, fix deferred
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable, fix deferred
	14.04 LTS trusty	Vulnerable, fix deferred

Notes

mrmajumder

Final fix not yet committed, the PR for this issue is still open. Thus marked as deferred (2026-09-18)

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
sos	Upstream: https://github.com/sosreport/sos/pull/4461

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

Base score 7.8 · High

Base metrics

Parameter	Value
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality impact	High
Integrity impact	High
Availability impact	High

Scores

Parameter	Value
Base score	7.8 · High
Exploitability score	-
Impact score	-

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H