Red Hat Enterprise Linux up to 10 gvfsd-admin chown toctou

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability classified as very critical was found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6/7/8/9/10. This vulnerability affects the function chown of the component gvfsd-admin. The manipulation results in toctou. This vulnerability was named CVE-2026-88924. The attack needs to be approached locally. There is no available exploit.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6/7/8/9/10. It has been classified as very critical. Affected is the function chown of the component gvfsd-admin. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a toctou vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-367. The product checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. This can cause the product to perform invalid actions when the resource is in an unexpected state. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

A flaw was found in the admin backend of gvfs. The privileged gvfsd-admin daemon changes the ownership of newly created private D-Bus sockets by calling the link-following chown() function on a pathname inside a user-controlled directory. A local attacker can exploit this via a Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) race condition and exchange the socket pathname with a symbolic link pointing to an arbitrary root-owned file (such as /etc/pam.d/su). The daemon subsequently follows the symlink and changes the ownership of the targeted root-owned file to the attacker's user ID. This allows an authenticated local attacker to modify critical system files, leading to a full local privilege escalation to root.

The advisory is shared for download at access.redhat.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-88924 since 09/10/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. The attack needs to be approached locally. There are known technical details, but no exploit is available. The current price for an exploit might be approx. USD $0-$5k (estimation calculated on 09/10/2026).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

Once again VulDB remains the best source for vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Type

• Operating System

Vendor

• Red Hat

Name

• Enterprise Linux

Version

• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

License

• commercial

Website

• Vendor: https://www.redhat.com/

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