What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-96281: Flatpak: flatpak: unprivileged active user can bypass anti-downgrade checks for system apps/runtimes

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.2 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: 2026-09-27 · updated 2026-09-30
• Weakness: CWE-284

Description

On a multi-user system, a user with an active local login session could downgrade a system-wide Flatpak app to an older version by removing the app's remote ref via the unprivileged system-helper RemoveLocalRef method, causing the anti-downgrade check to fail to find a reference date. A malicious local user could use this to expose other users of the same system to an app version with unfixed vulnerabilities.

Affected products

• 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

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-96281
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2539421
• https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/security/advisories/GHSA-q4gr-vc25-57m5

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