FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Closes Local Privilege Escalation Bugs Ahead of the Final Release

Updated Oct. 26, 2026, 1:35 a.m. ET: Adds that FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE shipped Sept. 8 and its support dates.

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is out, and nearly everything new in it is security work. Release engineering lead Colin Percival announced the first and final scheduled release candidate on Saturday, with 14.5-RELEASE targeted for Sept. 8.

Since BETA3, the changes are five security advisories, FreeBSD-SA-26:56, 58, 61, 62 and 63, plus one operational fix: the FreeBSD-kmods repository now points to kernel module packages built on 14.5.

The fixes

As Phoronix summarized, several of the bugs let local users escalate privileges:

• A race condition in the POSIX shared memory large-page configuration, found by GMO Cybersecurity by Ierae.
• A kernel use-after-free reachable through TTY ioctls, also credited to GMO Cybersecurity by Ierae.
• A kernel use-after-free in the sound driver’s SNDCTL_DSP_SYNCSTART ioctl, found by GovTech CSG.
• A HWPMC bug, found by Alexander Leidinger, where performance counters failed to detach during exec credential transitions, letting an unprivileged user keep monitoring a process after it ran a setuid or setgid binary.

The release candidate also pulls in the latest upstream OpenSSL code to fix multiple vulnerabilities in the library.

Testing and the final release

Installer and memory stick images are available, along with VM images in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK and raw formats for amd64, i386, aarch64 and riscv64, OCI container images, and Amazon EC2 AMIs. Percival asked testers to report problems through Bugzilla or the freebsd-stable mailing list. The full list of changes since 14.4 lives in the 14.5 release notes, which the project said would keep growing through the cycle.

The schedule held. FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE shipped Sept. 8 as the sixth release from the stable/14 branch, focused on bug fixes, driver updates and newer third-party software rather than new features. It’s supported until June 30, 2027. FreeBSD 14.4 reaches end of life on Dec. 31, 2026, and the 14 series as a whole is supported until Nov. 30, 2028.