CVE-2026-19079
Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation
MEDIUM 4.4
At a glance
- Source
- NVD
- EPSS
- EPSS 0.11 % · percentile 1 ()
- State
- PUBLISHED
- Published
- Updated
- Assigner
- redhat
- NVD status
- Awaiting Analysis
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.
Weaknesses (CWE)
- CWE-367 — TOCTOU Race Condition
References
Scores
| Version | Score | Vector | Scored by |
|---|---|---|---|
| CVSS 3.1 | MEDIUM 4.4 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N | redhat |
| CVSS 3.1 | MEDIUM 4.4 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N | NVD · secalert@redhat.com (Secondary) |
European references
- ENISA EUVD · EUVD-2026-54398
- GCVE · GCVE-0-2026-19079
Affected products
Sources
| Source | Licence |
|---|---|
| CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5) | CVE Program Terms of Use |
| EPSS (FIRST.org) | FIRST — attribution requested |
| ENISA EUVD | ENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged |
| NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feeds | Public domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD |