CVE-2026-41651
type: TechArticle
description: PackageKit is a a D-Bus abstraction layer that allows the user to manage packages in a secure way using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API. PackageKit between and including versions 1.0.2 and 1.3.4 is vulnerable to a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition on transaction flags that allows unprivileged users to install packages as root and thus leads to a local privilege escalation. This is patched in version 1.3.5. A local unprivileged user can install arbitrary RPM packages as root, including executing RPM scriptlets, without authentication. The vulnerability is a TOCTOU race condition on `transaction->cached_transaction_flags` combined with a silent state-machine guard that discards illegal backward transitions while leaving corrupted flags in place. Three bugs exist in `src/pk-transaction.c`: 1. Unconditional flag overwrite (line 4036): `InstallFiles()` writes caller-supplied flags to `transaction->cached_transaction_flags` without checking whether the transaction ha
date published: 2026-04-22T14:17:04.617
license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
source: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-41651
publisher: AI Analytics
source organization: NIST National Vulnerability Database
main entity: Thing
  additional type: Vulnerability
  score: 8.8
  severity: HIGH
keywords: CWE-367

AI Analytics
type: Organization