CVE-2026-85649
(Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho's Actualizer v1.2.0 and earlier contains a fail-open password validation vulnerability in the Alpha user and root user password loops of Shell/debian-minbase-install.sh. The installer invokes mkpasswd to generate yescrypt password hashes but does not check the command's return value and unconditionally accepts the result. If mkpasswd fails to generate a yescrypt hash, for example because an incompatible mkpasswd implementation or an environment without yescrypt support is used, the resulting password hash variable can be empty and the build proceeds. The resulting image can therefore contain empty password fields for the root and alpha accounts, potentially permitting passwordless authentication depending on the authentication configuration.
What this means for your business
- An attacker can use it only with access to the machine itself, with an administrator login, and without anyone at your company clicking anything.
- FIRST's prediction model gives it a 0.2% chance of attack attempts being seen in the next 30 days, ranking above 10% of all known flaws.
What to do
- 1Ask your IT team or provider whether any of your systems use the affected product.
- 2If you do, follow the vendor's guidance. No patch reference has been published yet.
Not sure if your company is exposed?
Fastnexa’s certified penetration testers can check whether attackers could use this flaw, or others like it, against your websites, apps and network. The full test is free for our first 10 founding clients until 31 December 2026.
Scoring
- CVSS
- 7.9 (v3.1)
- Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N- Weakness
- CWE-252
- Assigned by
- 5a6e4751-2f3f-4070-9419-94fb35b644e8
Dates
- Published
- 2026-09-04
- Last modified
- 2026-09-08
- Sources
- NVD
References
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22169659
- https://github.com/ChewKeanHo/software-actualizer/blob/v1.2.0/Shell/debian-minbase-install.sh#L788
- https://github.com/ChewKeanHo/software-actualizer/commit/50a0932ac705635d9af62955c353e7c6df003a61.patch
- https://github.com/ChewKeanHo/software-actualizer/releases/tag/v1.2.1