What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-19816: PackageKit: dnf5 backend ignores SIMULATE on RepoRemove

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 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: 2026-09-14 · updated 2026-09-18
• Weakness: CWE-863

Description

A flaw was found in PackageKit. PackageKit skips the polkit authorization check for transactions carrying the SIMULATE (dry-run) flag. In the dnf5 backend, the RepoRemove handler ignores that contract and always executes the real transaction because its guard is written as (role == REPO_REMOVE || !SIMULATE), which is always true for RepoRemove. An unprivileged local user can therefore perform a genuine package uninstall while claiming to simulate. This vulnerability only affects systems using PackageKit with the dnf5 backend.

Affected products

• Fedora: from 1.3.4 before 1.4.0 — fixed in 1.4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Fedora 1.4.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2515940
• https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit/commit/33be77b3ecd3b566ca117358dc18c58c964e627b
• https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit/security/advisories/GHSA-g5gf-h68q-gxc8

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