Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that protects devices from unwanted content without installing any client-side software. Prior to 6.5, advanced/Scripts/utils.sh getFTLPID() attempts to validate the pihole-owned /run/pihole-FTL.pid file with expr "${FTL_PID}" : "[^[:digit:]]", but this rejects only values whose first character is not a digit. An attacker with code execution as the pihole user can write a digit-prefixed arithmetic expression to the pihole-owned PID file. Root-run pihole subcommands then evaluate [[ "$pid" -eq "-1" ]], causing Bash to recursively evaluate array subscripts and execute command substitution as root. This bypasses the content-validation portion of the CVE-2026-41489 remediation while leaving its hardcoded PID-file path protection intact. This issue is fixed in version 6.5.
Fix
Nothing published yet: no patch, vendor advisory or mitigation reference on NVD, no vendor advisory in the News for this CVE, not in CISA's KEV, no fixed package version. BaselineWatch does not guess at one.
Change history 1
- First seenCVSS 7.8 · pi-holeNVD modified 2026-10-30 20:03
Affected (CPE criteria) 0
NVD has not attached CPE configurations yet.
References 4
- https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/security/advisories/GHSA-cf36-4hhc-8398 x_refsource_confirm
- https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/pull/6719 x_refsource_misc
- https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/commit/555dd4d8b3699327fbba482bb73cce5f53979bd1 x_refsource_misc
- https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/releases/tag/v6.5 x_refsource_misc