Description
A vulnerability in the rm utility of uutils coreutils allows the bypass of safeguard mechanisms intended to protect the current directory. While the utility correctly refuses to delete . or .., it fails to recognize equivalent paths with trailing slashes, such as ./ or .///. An accidental or malicious execution of rm -rf ./ results in the silent recursive deletion of all contents within the current directory. The command further obscures the data loss by reporting a misleading 'Invalid input' error, which may cause users to miss the critical window for data recovery.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uutils | coreutils | — | — |
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.
Debian
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian 14 | rust-coreutils | 0.8.0-1 | — |
| Debian 13 | rust-coreutils | No fix yet | — |
| Debian 12 | rust-coreutils | No fix yet | — |
Ubuntu
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu 26.04 LTS | rust-coreutils | 0.10.0-1ubuntu2~26.04.1 | USN-9041-1 |
| Ubuntu 25.10 | rust-coreutils | No fix yet | — |
| Ubuntu 24.04 LTS | rust-coreutils | No fix yet | — |
Wolfi
| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wolfi rolling | uutils | 0.8.0-r2 | — |
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed | Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| crates.io | uu_rm | < 0.6.0 | 0.6.0 | GHSA-89p7-7cq3-hhr2 |
Advisories 1
- USN-9041-1 rust-coreutils vulnerabilities Ubuntu Security Notices (USN) · Nov 12, 2026
References
- https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/9749 issue-tracking