CVE-2026-41489

high

Published 2026-05-11 · Modified 2026-05-13

CVSS v3

8.8

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

CVSS v2

—

VIR risk

8.8

Description

Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that protects devices from unwanted content without installing any client-side software. From 6.0 to before Core 6.4.2 and FTL 6.6.1, two shell scripts executed as root by systemd (pihole-FTL-prestart.sh and pihole-FTL-poststop.sh) read the files.pid path from this config without validation and use it in privileged file operations (install and rm -f). By writing an arbitrary path into files.pid, an attacker with pihole privilege can cause root to delete and then recreate any file on the system outside the ProtectSystem=full-restricted directories, gaining write access to it. On a default Pi-hole installation this yields local privilege escalation to root via SSH authorized keys manipulation. If /root/.ssh/authorized_keys does not exist (default on fresh installs), only ExecStartPre is required. If the file exists, ExecStopPost deletes it first, and the same restart triggers both hooks in sequence. This vulnerability is fixed in Core 6.4.2 and FTL 6.6.1.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

82%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No vendor mitigations ingested yet for this CVE. The mitigation-content worker queues fetches as references arrive — check back in a few minutes, or see the references list below.

References

CWEs

CWE-15 CWE-269 CWE-732

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.