Auth bypass in Coreos Zincati

CVE-2025-27512

Zincati is an auto-update agent for Fedora CoreOS hosts. Zincati ships a polkit rule which allows the `zincati` system user to use the actions `org.projectatomic.rpmostree1.deploy` to deploy updates to the system and `org.projectatomic.rpmostree1.finalize-deployment` to reboot the system into the deployed update. Since Zincati v0.0.24, this polkit rule contains a logic error which broadens access of those polkit actions to any unprivileged user rather than just the `zincati` system user. In practice, this means that any unprivileged user with access to the system D-Bus socket is able to deploy older Fedora CoreOS versions (which may have other known vulnerabilities). Note that rpm-ostree enforces that the selected version must be from the same branch the system is currently on so this cannot directly be used to deploy an attacker-controlled update payload. This primarily impacts users running untrusted workloads with access to the system D-Bus socket. Note that in general, untrusted workloads should not be given this access, whether containerized or not. By default, containers do not have access to the system D-Bus socket. The logic error is fixed in Zincati v0.0.30. A workaround is to manually add a following polkit rule, instructions for which are available in the GitHub Security Advisory.

Published 2025-03-17 · last modified 2026-06-17.