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Re: uutils coreutils CVEs


From: cyber security <cs7778503 () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 4 May 2026 06:14:03 -0400

of course, it is a vuln, of low severity by example

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 6:09 AM Jakub Wilk <jwilk () jwilk net> wrote:

* Collin Funk <collin.funk1 () gmail com>, 2026-05-01 18:49:
* CVE-2026-35352

We can see that uutils 'mkfifo' creates the fifo with world readable
and writable permissions and then uses chmod() which introduces a
TOCTOU race that can be exploited by another user creating a symbolic
link in it's place:

   $ mkfifo --version
   mkfifo (uutils coreutils) 0.8.0
   $ strace mkfifo -m 700 /tmp/fifo
   [...]
   umask(000)                              = 002
   umask(002)                              = 000
   mknodat(AT_FDCWD, "/tmp/fifo", S_IFIFO|0666) = 0
   chmod("/tmp/fifo", 0700)                = 0

Creating the FIFO with default permission could allow other users to
open it before the chmod(..., 0700) call. This is indeed a
vulnerability, but unrelated to symlinks, and it's a different issue
than the one in the description of CVE-2026-35352:

A Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) race condition exists in the
mkfifo utility of uutils coreutils. The utility creates a FIFO and then
performs a path-based chmod to set permissions. A local attacker with
write access to the parent directory can swap the newly created FIFO
for a symbolic link between these two operations.

Note that this attack doesn't work in /tmp, because the sticky bit
prevents the attacker from deleting or renaming other users' files. The
victim would have to do something like "mkfifo /home/mallory/fifo". So,
uh, don't do that?

It's questionable if this is a vulnerability at all.

--
Jakub Wilk


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