CVE-2026-41991
GNU gzip contains a vulnerability in the gzexe utility related to insecure temporary file handling. When the mktemp utility is not available in the user’s PATH, gzexe falls back to constructing a temporary file path based solely on the process ID (PID). This predictable filename is created without exclusive access or existence checks. A local attacker can pre‑create the predicted temporary file path as a symbolic link pointing to an arbitrary file writable by the victim. When gzexe runs, it follows the symlink and overwrites the target file, resulting in a time‑of‑check to time‑of‑use (TOCTOU) condition that allows arbitrary file overwrite. This issue has been fixed in the commit 4e6f8b24ab823146ab8776f0b7fe486ab34d4269
Scoring
- Severity
- LOW
- CVSS base score
- 2
- CVSS vector
- CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
- EPSS probability
- 0.19%
- CWE
- CWE-377
- Published
- 2026-06-29
- Last modified
- 2026-09-14
Affected products
- GNU gzip
Weakness type
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