What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-35338: uutils coreutils chmod Path Traversal Bypass of --preserve-root

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-04-22 · updated 2026-10-26
• Weakness: CWE-22

Description

A vulnerability in the chmod utility of uutils coreutils allows users to bypass the --preserve-root safety mechanism. The implementation only validates if the target path is literally / and does not canonicalize the path. An attacker or accidental user can use path variants such as /../ or symbolic links to execute destructive recursive operations (e.g., chmod -R 000) on the entire root filesystem, leading to system-wide permission loss and potential complete system breakdown.

Affected products

• Uutils coreutils: before 0.6.0 — fixed in 0.6.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Uutils coreutils 0.6.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/10033
• https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.6.0

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