CVE-2026-19079: Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.4 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-08-07 · updated 2026-09-01
Weakness: CWE-367

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 products

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: all versions
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9: all versions
Red Hat Hardened Images: all versions — fixed in 3.11-2.2.hum1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Red Hat Hardened Images 3.11-2.2.hum1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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