Vulnerability · Published Aug 7, 2026 · Assigned by redhat
CVE-2026-19079Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation
Medium 4.4
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 from Red Hat. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 1% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official 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.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:12 | policycoreutils | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Debian:13 | policycoreutils | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Debian:14 | policycoreutils | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | policycoreutils | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Ubuntu:24.04:LTS | policycoreutils | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | policycoreutils | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-19079 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | policycoreutils | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-19079 |
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat | Red Hat Hardened Images | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 | see references |
| Red Hat | Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 | see references |
Weakness: CWE-367 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
References
- RHSA-2026:51861 vendor-advisory, x_refsource_REDHAT
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-19079 vdb-entry, x_refsource_REDHAT
- RHBZ#2511976 issue-tracking, x_refsource_REDHAT
- https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/commit/a556538c2d5d2583273e025b45c02651fef47679