Technical impact
A time‑of‑check to time‑of‑use race in the chcon utility of uutils coreutils allows a local attacker with write access to a directory tree to redirect a privileged recursive relabeling operation to unintended files or directories. This undermines the expected hardening provided by SELinux by letting an attacker change security labels on sensitive objects without authorization. The weakness is classified as CWE‑367.
Affected Systems
The vulnerability affects the uutils coreutils package, specifically the chcon command. No specific version information is listed in the data, so any version prior to the latest release should be considered at risk until a fix is applied.
Risk and Exploitability
The CVSS score of 4.5 indicates moderate impact, and as EPSS is not available the likelihood of exploitation is unknown. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog. Based on the description, the attack vector is local with write access to the target directories; the attacker would perform timing‑sensitive rename or symbolic link races during a recursive chcon run.
Github GHSA
Ubuntu USN