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High · 7.9 Public exploit CVE-2026-85649 EUVD-2026-71096

(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 Sep 4, 2026 · Updated Sep 4, 2026 · Assigned by CIRCL

Vendor: chewkeanho Product: software-actualizer

Description

(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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
chewkeanho software-actualizer ≤ 1.2.0 —

Public exploits

Exploit or proof-of-concept code for this vulnerability is publicly available, which lowers the bar for attackers. Treat it as a reason to patch sooner.

Third-party code, not reviewed by us. Public PoCs are sometimes fake or contain malware. Read the code first and run it only in an isolated lab, against systems you are authorised to test.

GitHub 1 repository

Sources: PoC-in-GitHub, Metasploit Framework, Exploit-DB — updated daily. Only links are listed; no exploit code is hosted here.

References