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CVE-2026-96281

Flatpak: flatpak: unprivileged active user can bypass anti-downgrade checks for system apps/runtimes

Products / packages Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 · Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 · 1 more

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Severity and exploitation

Not in CISA KEV

KEV coverage does not rule out exploitation.

KEV checked 14/11/2026, 21:00:34 UTC
redhat · CVSS:3.1 · 6.2
Assessment vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:H/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Severity

medium6.2

CVSS measures technical severity, not the likelihood of an attack.

Known exploitation

Not listed in the checked CISA KEV catalog

Absence from CISA KEV does not rule out attacks.

Public exploit

Not established by this record

Missing evidence does not mean no public exploit exists.

Remediation

Source guidance available

Review the recorded instructions. Guidance may be a workaround rather than a fixed version.

What this means

A local user with an active login session can bypass anti-downgrade checks for system Flatpak apps, potentially exposing other users to older versions with vulnerabilities. The weakness is due to improper access control. Affected products include Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Summarized by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast. Verify details against the original sources.

Attack conditions

No attack-condition excerpt has been identified here. Review the full source description and references for authentication, network access, and configuration requirements.

Review supporting sources →

Affected versions

Check the exact model, release, and any platform requirements against your installation.

Red Hat · redhat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

0 ranges
redhat version evidence

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affected

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: affected

Product identifiers (CPE)cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:10

Red Hat · redhat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

0 ranges
redhat version evidence

Compare with this publisher’s ranges. This does not inspect your installation.

affected

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: affected

Product identifiers (CPE)cpe:/o:redhat:rhel_els:7

Red Hat · redhat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

0 ranges
redhat version evidence

Compare with this publisher’s ranges. This does not inspect your installation.

affected

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: affected

Product identifiers (CPE)cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:8

Red Hat · redhat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

0 ranges
redhat version evidence

Compare with this publisher’s ranges. This does not inspect your installation.

affected

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: affected

Product identifiers (CPE)cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:9
Automatic dependency matching is unavailable for this record. Use the product evidence and publisher’s instructions to check your installation.

What to do

Compare your installed product and version with the affected versions above. A matching product name alone does not confirm exposure.

Ensure that Flatpak apps installed system-wide are fully updated before running them.

redhat guidance ↗

cve.new guidance unless attributed to a publisher. This page does not inspect your installation.

Public exploit evidence

No public exploit reference is identified in the imported evidence. This is not a claim that no exploit exists.

Original source description

Read the full publisher description

On a multi-user system, a user with an active local login session could downgrade a system-wide Flatpak app to an older version by removing the app's remote ref via the unprivileged system-helper RemoveLocalRef method, causing the anti-downgrade check to fail to find a reference date. A malicious local user could use this to expose other users of the same system to an app version with unfixed vulnerabilities.

References

3 sources
access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-96281
Security advisoryredhat
bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi
Source referenceredhat
flatpak/flatpak · security/advisories/GHSA-q4gr-vc25-57m5
Security advisoryredhat

Inside the record

Evidence available

Package identity · not supplied
Version evidence · not supplied
Remediation guidance
Weakness classification
Additional publishers

Describes the evidence in this view, not whether the product is safe.

Original records

CVE-2026-96281

View the latest unmodified CVE JSON from the official source. It may be newer than this imported page.

cve.new JSON →

Underlying weaknesses

The source’s classification of what caused the vulnerability.

CWE-284 ↗

Improper Access Control

redhat

Related →
Contributing organizations · 2
redhat

Assigning organization

2026-11-06
CISA-ADP

Additional data publisher

2026-09-30

Timeline

All times UTC

  1. Advisory published

    Publication date supplied by the source.

  2. Source updated

    Latest modification date supplied by the source.

  3. Last imported by cve.new

    Latest catalog import, not the date we first saw this advisory.

What changed

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