CVE-2026-88924 is a vulnerability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Published on September 10, 2026
Gvfs: gvfs-admin socket ownership race permits local root
A flaw was found in the admin backend of gvfs. The privileged gvfsd-admin daemon changes the ownership of newly created private D-Bus sockets by calling the link-following chown() function on a pathname inside a user-controlled directory. A local attacker can exploit this via a Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) race condition and exchange the socket pathname with a symbolic link pointing to an arbitrary root-owned file (such as /etc/pam.d/su). The daemon subsequently follows the symlink and changes the ownership of the targeted root-owned file to the attacker's user ID. This allows an authenticated local attacker to modify critical system files, leading to a full local privilege escalation to root.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2026-88924 is exploitable with local system access, and requires 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 be very high.
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-2026-88924 has been classified to as a TOCTTOU vulnerability or weakness.
Products Associated with CVE-2026-88924
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