CVE-2026-19079

Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation

State
Published
Severity
4.4 Medium
Published
Aug 7, 2026
Updated
Sep 1, 2026
Reserved
Aug 6, 2026

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Description

A TOCTOU (Time-of-Check-Time-of-Use) race condition vulnerability was found in the fixfiles script in policycoreutils. When running fixfiles relabel or fixfiles restore, the script used find and chcon commands to locate and relabel unlabeled files under /tmp and other directories. A local attacker could exploit a race window between the file discovery and the label change operation by swapping directory components with symlinks, causing chcon to follow the symlink and modify SELinux labels on arbitrary system files. This could undermine SELinux mandatory access control protections on critical files such as /etc/shadow.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.14.4 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:Nredhat

Weaknesses

  • CWE-367 Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition

Affected Products

ProductVersions
Red Hat Hardened ImagesRed Hat
  • 3.11-2.2.hum1 and laterNot affected
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10Red Hat
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Red Hat
      Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7Red Hat
        Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8Red Hat
          Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9Red Hat
            Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat
              Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4Red Hat

                References

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