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MEDIUM Received

CVE-2026-19079

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.

Published 07 Aug 2026, 08:16 UTC Last modified 07 Aug 2026, 08:16 UTC
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Attack profile

The conditions required to exploit this vulnerability and its potential impact.

Attack vector Local
Attack complexity High
Privileges required Low
User interaction Required
Scope Unchanged
Confidentiality None
Integrity High
Availability None
Exploitability0.8
Impact3.6
02

Affected products

Product applicability statements supplied with the NVD record.

NVD has not published structured affected-product data for this record.
03

Weakness classification

CWE categories help security teams group the underlying software weakness.

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Source references

External advisories, patches and technical reports attached to this CVE record.