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VulnerabilityPublished Updated

CVE-2026-19079: Red Hat Hardened Images · Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition

Affects Red Hat Hardened ImagesSource CVE Database V5

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Not known to be exploited · CVSS 4.4 Medium.

Data as of 5 Nov 2026, 00:01 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
4.4Medium
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 1% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 7 Aug 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 5 Nov 2026.

What to do

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
Red Hat Hardened Imagespolicycoreutils-mainAffected–Fixed in–
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10policycoreutilsAffected–Fixed in–
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6policycoreutilsAffected–Fixed in–
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7policycoreutilsAffected–Fixed in–
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8policycoreutilsAffected–Fixed in–
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9policycoreutilsAffected–Fixed in–

AI-suggested

Red Hat has released updated policycoreutils packages (version 3.11-2.2.hum1) that fix this vulnerability. Users should apply these updates to remediate the issue. As a workaround, administrators can use the 'restorecon -R /' command directly instead of 'fixfiles relabel' or 'fixfiles restore' to avoid the vulnerable /tmp-specific find+chcon code path. This workaround skips the /tmp cleanup logic, which is generally unnecessary on modern systems where /tmp is mounted as tmpfs. No other actions are required if the update is applied.

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.

References

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