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.
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Affected Vendors & Products
References
History
Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:45:00 +0000
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | |
| Title | Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation | |
| First Time appeared |
Redhat
Redhat enterprise Linux Redhat hummingbird Redhat openshift |
|
| Weaknesses | CWE-367 | |
| CPEs | cpe:/a:redhat:hummingbird:1 cpe:/a:redhat:openshift:4 cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:10 cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6 cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:7 cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:8 cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:9 |
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| Vendors & Products |
Redhat
Redhat enterprise Linux Redhat hummingbird Redhat openshift |
|
| References |
| |
| Metrics |
cvssV3_1
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Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: redhat
Published:
Updated: 2026-08-07T07:21:55.858Z
Reserved: 2026-08-06T11:13:39.734Z
Link: CVE-2026-19079
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OpenCVE Enrichment
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