CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-54370 — acl security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.2

acl before version 2.4.0 contains a time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability that allows local attackers to escalate privileges by replacing a pathname component with a symbolic link between an lstat() check and subsequent symlink-following operations such as stat(), chown(), chmod(), acl_get_file(), and acl_set_file(). Attackers who control a pathname component can redirect file access control list operations to arbitrary files when getfacl, setfacl, or chacl is invoked by a privileged process over an attacker-controlled path, resulting in local privilege escalation.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.2 (4.0)
Published
2026-06-29
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-367

Affected products

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Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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