CVE-2026-54584
Description
A flaw was found in mport, the MidnightBSD Package Manager. When extracting package metadata, mport used temporary directories that could be controlled by the environment, even when operating with elevated privileges. An attacker who can control the environment during a privileged mport operation could redirect the temporary metadata extraction to a location of their choice. This could allow the attacker to write files to arbitrary locations, potentially leading to privilege escalation.
Statement
Red Hat has evaluated this vulnerability as having an Important severity impact because a local unprivileged attacker could leverage manipulated environment variables during privileged execution to overwrite arbitrary files, potentially escalating privileges to root. However, the mport package manager is exclusive to the MidnightBSD operating system and is not distributed, supported, or present in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or any other Red Hat product lines. Consequently, Red Hat environments are not affected by this flaw.
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Read Application Data
On some operating systems, the fact that the temporary file exists may be apparent to any user with sufficient privileges to access that directory. Since the file is visible, the application that is using the temporary file could be known. If one has access to list the processes on the system, the attacker has gained information about what the user is doing at that time. By correlating this with the applications the user is running, an attacker could potentially discover what a user's actions are. From this, higher levels of security could be breached.
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