Disclaimer: Community trackers are created by Red Hat Product Security team on a best effort basis. Package maintainers are required to ascertain if the flaw indeed affects their package, before starting the update process.

A flaw was found in OpenSSH ssh. ssh_valid_ruser did not reject '$' or a backslash that is not at the end of a username entered on the command line. Those characters still expand through %u in ProxyCommand or Match exec. Usernames written in the configuration file are not subject to this check. CVE-2026-35386 is already backported and rejects a different set of shell metacharacters, plus a trailing backslash. Hostnames in that fix already reject '$' and '\'. Usernames do not. This is a new CVE on top of CVE-2026-35386.