Securing Internet-Critical Software: How We Could Have Backdoored Bash
(May 2026)
TL;DR:
- an email address like atouch${IFS}/tmp/savane-rce-proof@attacker.example gave any registered user code execution on its backend.
- From there, we made our account a superuser,
- impersonated Bashβs maintainer, and confirmed we could add an SSH key with push access to the upstream Bash repository.
- An unpatched kernel gave us root access and access to a GNU backup server. We reported it to the FSF on May 11, 2026.
FSF incident report: https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/security/savannah-20260807.pdf
[link] [comments]