Tailscale warns of SSH flaws allowing root privilege escalation

The Tailscale security team is working to patch almost a dozen security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to steal credentials, crash servers, gain root privileges, and more.

Tailscale develops a software-defined mesh virtual private network (VPN) built on WireGuard that lets users connect computers, servers, and cloud instances from anywhere to the same encrypted mesh network ("tailnet") via direct peer-to-peer (P2P) connections.

Cyberdione Labs discovered 11 flaws (collectively known as Tailworm) that still lack patches during a security audit of Tailscale 1.104.2 and the self-hosted headscale v0.29.5 control server.

"All findings were verified by reproduction in a lab environment on unmodified, released software (tailscale v1.104.2, headscale v0.29.5)," said Erica Windisch, founder of Cyberdione Labs, who reported the flaws to Tailscale and publicly released the details.