CVE-2026-19079 vulnerability in Red Hat Products
Published on August 7, 2026
Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation
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.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2026-19079 can be exploited with local system access, requires user interaction and a small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is consided to have a high level of attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to have no impact on confidentiality, a high impact on integrity, and no impact on availability.
Timeline
Reported to Red Hat.
Made public.
Weakness Type
What is a TOCTTOU Vulnerability?
The software checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. This can cause the software to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state. This weakness can be security-relevant when an attacker can influence the state of the resource between check and use. This can happen with shared resources such as files, memory, or even variables in multithreaded programs.
CVE-2026-19079 has been classified to as a TOCTTOU vulnerability or weakness.
Products Associated with CVE-2026-19079
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