Medium severity · published Aug 7, 2026
CVE-2026-19079
Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation
4.4
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
High
Privileges
Low
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 1% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat Hardened Images · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
RH
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 · Red Hat
All versions, or not specified · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-19079
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-19079
access.redhat.com
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:51861
access.redhat.com
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-19079
bugzilla.redhat.com
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2511976
github.com
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/commit/a556538c2d5d2583273e025b45c02651fef47679
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