Vulnerability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

CVE-2026-19079

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.

Vulnerability class: TOCTOU (Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use)

EPSS: 0.001 (0.3th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 4.4 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-19079?
CVE-2026-19079 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, classified under Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition. CVSS score: 4.4/10. Published 2026-08-07.
How severe is CVE-2026-19079?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 4.4 out of 10.