CWE-363BaseDraft
Race Condition Enabling Link Following
The product checks the status of a file or directory before accessing it, which produces a race condition in which the file can be replaced with a link before the access is performed, causing the product to access the wrong file.
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Related vulnerabilities
CVE-2023-6857When resolving a symlink, a race may occur where the buffer passed to `readlink` may actually be smaller than necessary.
*This bug only affects Firefox on Unix-based operating systems (Android, Linux, MacOS). Windows is unaffected.* This vulnerability affects Firefox ESR < 115.6, Thunderbird < 115.6, and Firefox < 121.
CVE-2025-13492A potential security vulnerability has been identified in HP Image Assistant for versions prior to 5.3.3. The vulnerability
could potentially allow a local attacker to escalate privileges via a race condition when installing packages.
CVE-2022-21658Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. The Rust Security Response WG was notified that the `std::fs::remove_dir_all` standard library function is vulnerable a race condition enabling symlink following (CWE-363). An attacker could use this security issue to trick a privileged program into deleting files and directories the attacker couldn't otherwise access or delete. Rust 1.0.0 through Rust 1.58.0 is affected by this vulnerability with 1.58.1 containing a patch. Note that the following build targets don't have usable APIs to properly mitigate the attack, and are thus still vulnerable even with a patched toolchain: macOS before version 10.10 (Yosemite) and REDOX. We recommend everyone to update to Rust 1.58.1 as soon as possible, especially people developing programs expected to run in privileged contexts (including system daemons and setuid binaries), as those have the highest risk of being affected by this. Note that adding checks in your codebase before calling remove_dir_all will not mitigate the vulnerability, as they would also be vulnerable to race conditions like remove_dir_all itself. The existing mitigation is working as intended outside of race conditions.