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OpenAdvisories

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.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
Red Hat Red Hat Hardened Images — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 — —
Red Hat Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 — —
Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 — —
Red Hat Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 — —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Debian 14 policycoreutils No fix yet —
Debian 13 policycoreutils No fix yet —
Debian 12 policycoreutils No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 26.10 policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Show 3 more (older releases, extended support, other products)
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS policycoreutils No fix yet —
ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Red Hat Hardened Images 1 policycoreutils +8 3.11-2.2.hum1 RHSA-2026:51861

Amazon Linux

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Amazon Linux 2 policycoreutils +6 2.5-22.amzn2.0.1 ALAS2-2026-3949

Advisories 2

References