CVE-2026-19079 Policycoreutils: policycoreutils: toctou race condition in fixfiles allows arbitrary selinux label manipulation

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.

Exploitable with local access to the machine, with an ordinary account and if a user takes an action; an attacker can seriously compromise confidentiality, integrity or availability.

Attack vector

Local

Attack complexity

High

Privileges required

Low

Interaction

Required

Scope

Unchanged

Confidentiality

None

Integrity

High

Availability

None

Affected products and versions