CVE-2026-19079Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation
- 4.4MediumCVSS base score
- 0.11%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 99% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- NonePublic exploitsnone known yet
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.
Timeline
ID reserved
By redhat
- 1 day later
· 1 day later
Published
- 3 months later
· 3 months later
Record updated
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| redhatCNA (assigner) | 3.1 | Medium4.4 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N |
| NVDNVD · Awaiting Analysis | 3.1 | Medium4.4 | CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.11% · top 99% of all CVEs (15 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: Medium 4.4.
Affected products
Red Hat · Red Hat Hardened Images
- unaffected 3.11-2.2.hum1 – < *
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
All versions: unknown
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4
All versions: affected
Red Hat · Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5
All versions: affected
What to do
Workaround: As a workaround, use 'restorecon -R /' directly instead of 'fixfiles relabel' or 'fixfiles restore' to perform filesystem relabeling. This avoids the vulnerable /tmp-specific find+chcon code path entirely. Note that this skips the /tmp cleanup logic, but on modern systems where /tmp is mounted as tmpfs, this cleanup is unnecessary as tmpfs cannot retain files from a prior boot.
References
References4
- RHSA-2026:51861 (opens in a new tab)vendor-advisoryx_refsource_REDHAT
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-19079 (opens in a new tab)vdb-entryx_refsource_REDHAT
- RHBZ#2511976 (opens in a new tab)issue-trackingx_refsource_REDHAT
- https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/commit/a556538c2d5d2583273e025b45c02651fef47679 (opens in a new tab)
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2026-54398 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2026-19079)Record last updated .