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The GLib D-Bus client-side implementation of the DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 SASL authentication mechanism does not validate the cookie_context parameter received from the server. The D-Bus specification explicitly states that cookie context names must not contain the characters /, \, . (period), spaces, or ASCII control characters. However, GLib's client-side code accepts this value verbatim and uses it to construct a filesystem path via g_build_filename(). A malicious D-Bus server can supply a cookie_context containing path traversal sequences such as ../.target_file, causing the client to read an arbitrary file outside the ~/.dbus-keyrings/ directory. The file contents (specifically the third space-separated token of the first matching line) are then incorporated into a SHA1 hash computation and sent back to the server as part of the authentication response. The server can verify guessed file contents against this SHA1 hash, enabling data exfiltration.
This issue has been addressed in the following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Via RHSA-2026:49512 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:49512