FreeBSD vulnerability

The TIOCSCTTY ioctl handler drops the tty lock in order to acquire the process tree lock. After reacquiring the tty lock, the handler did not revalidate the state of the terminal, and could proceed to link a terminal that was concurrently being destroyed to the calling process' session. An unprivileged local user can exploit this race condition to escalate privileges.

Published 26 Aug 2026Updated 24 Sep 20261 sources
CVSS 7.0

What happened

The TIOCSCTTY ioctl handler drops the tty lock in order to acquire the process tree lock. After reacquiring the tty lock, the handler did not revalidate the state of the terminal, and could proceed to link a terminal that was concurrently being destroyed to the calling process' session. An unprivileged local user can exploit this race condition to escalate privileges.

Affected versions

FreeBSD: 15.1-RELEASE through before p3 (release); 15.0-RELEASE through before p13 (release); 14.4-RELEASE through before p9 (release) Fixed: See vendor advisory.

Why it matters

Review the vendor advisory and exposure of the affected product to determine operational impact.

Detection & mitigation

  • Apply vendor-provided updates or mitigations.
  • Review affected product exposure and access logs.

Public PoC references

No public PoC reference has passed the current publication threshold.