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Fencer Intel
high 7.9

CVE-2026-85649 json

(Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho's Actualizer v1.2.0 and earlier contains a fail-open password validation vulnerability in the Alpha user and root…

published 2mo ago modified 2mo ago also EUVD-2026-71096

cvss
7.9
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 10%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

(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.

Patch / fix

Is CVE-2026-85649 in your stack? Fencer shows which of your repositories are affected as soon as an advisory lands, and opens the fix as a pull request.

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
2mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.20% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 10% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N

Affected products

  • chewkeanho software-actualizer

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.