CVE-2023-28436

Non-interactive Tailscale SSH sessions on FreeBSD may use the effective group ID of the tailscaled process

State
Published
Severity
5.7 Medium
Published
Mar 23, 2023
Updated
Feb 25, 2025
Reserved
Mar 15, 2023

Read the record on cve.org

Description

Tailscale is software for using Wireguard and multi-factor authentication (MFA). A vulnerability identified in the implementation of Tailscale SSH starting in version 1.34.0 and prior to prior to 1.38.2 in FreeBSD allows commands to be run with a higher privilege group ID than that specified in Tailscale SSH access rules. A difference in the behavior of the FreeBSD `setgroups` system call from POSIX meant that the Tailscale client running on a FreeBSD-based operating system did not appropriately restrict groups on the host when using Tailscale SSH. When accessing a FreeBSD host over Tailscale SSH, the egid of the tailscaled process was used instead of that of the user specified in Tailscale SSH access rules.

Tailscale SSH commands may have been run with a higher privilege group ID than that specified in Tailscale SSH access rules if they met all of the following criteria: the destination node was a FreeBSD device with Tailscale SSH enabled; Tailscale SSH access rules permitted access for non-root users; and a non-interactive SSH session was used.

Affected users should upgrade to version 1.38.2 to remediate the issue.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.15.7 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:NGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

Affected Products

ProductVersions
tailscaletailscale
  • >= 1.34.0, < 1.38.2Affected

References

Every record here comes from the CVE Program’s CVE List. © 1999–2026 The MITRE Corporation. CVE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation. The records are reproduced under the CVE Program terms of use.