Attack ChainAIDerived
Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain
-
AccessObtain local unprivileged session
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DeliveryCraft label beginning with dash
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ExploitCall udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() via D-Bus
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Executionntfslabel/fatlabel parses label as flag
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ImpactUnintended filesystem label operation
Vulnerability Assessment
| Weakness |
CWE
OWASP Top 10:2025
A05:2025 - Injection
ASVS 5.0
V1 - Encoding and Sanitization Argument sanitization
|
| Exploitation Conditions | Requires an authenticated LOCAL unprivileged user with access to the system D-Bus and the udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() method; the attacker must supply a label value that begins with a '-' character to an NTFS or VFAT volume, triggering libblockdev's bd_fs_ntfs_set_label() / bd_fs_vfat_set_label() which invoke ntfslabel/fatlabel without a '--' end-of-options separator or dash-value validation. Limiting factors: exploitation is strictly local (no network vector), requires an active D-Bus/session login (PR:L), is confined to systems using udisks2 on top of libblockdev with NTFS/VFAT label-setting, and yields only low integrity impact (no confidentiality or availability effect, no privilege escalation), substantially capping real-world risk despite the trivial attack complexity. |
| Impact | All signals converge on this being a genuinely LOW-priority issue rather than a high-CVSS-but-overblown one. The provided CVSS 3.1 vector (AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N, base 3.3) indicates a LOCAL attack vector requiring an authenticated unprivileged session (PR:L), with only LOW integrity impact and no confidentiality or availability impact. This is consistent with the description: exploitation is reachable only by unprivileged LOCAL users via the udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() D-Bus method, not remotely. No EPSS score was supplied; no CISA KEV listing is present (not actively exploited); and no public POC is referenced - so exploitation status is 'no public exploit identified at time of analysis.' No SSVC decision data was provided. The CWE-88 (argument injection) mechanism is real and plausible, but the practical ceiling is low: an attacker who already has a local session can only coerce the ntfslabel/fatlabel helpers into misinterpreting a dash-prefixed label as a flag, yielding limited, device-label-scoped integrity effects rather than privilege escalation or code execution. Note a minor tension to verify: the 'Authentication Bypass' tag overstates the flaw - the description and CWE-88 point to argument injection, and the 'without administrator authentication' phrasing describes the normal unprivileged D-Bus path, not a true auth bypass. |
| Exploit ScenarioDerived | A logged-in unprivileged local user (or a compromised local process with an active desktop/D-Bus session) invokes the udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() D-Bus method and supplies an NTFS or VFAT volume label beginning with '-'. Because libblockdev passes the label as a bare positional argument to ntfslabel/fatlabel without a '--' end-of-options separator, the spawned utility interprets the value as a command-line flag, potentially bypassing safety checks or triggering unintended operations on the target filesystem. No public exploit code is identified at time of analysis, and the low CVSS complexity reflects that crafting the malicious label is trivial once local D-Bus access exists. |
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Alert meAnalysisAIv1 – Oct 16, 2026
Argument injection in libblockdev's NTFS and VFAT label-setting routines lets a local, unprivileged user smuggle command-line flags into the ntfslabel and fatlabel utilities through a filesystem label that begins with a dash. The vulnerable paths (bd_fs_ntfs_set_label() and bd_fs_vfat_set_label()) are reachable without administrator authentication via the udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() D-Bus method, but exploitation is strictly local and the assessed impact is low integrity only - no confidentiality or availability loss and no privilege escalation. No public exploit code has been identified at time of analysis, and the low CVSS score (3.3, AV:L/PR:L/I:L) reflects the limited blast radius rather than an unexplored attack surface.
RemediationAI
No vendor-released patch identified at time of analysis - the supplied references point only to the Red Hat CVE page (https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-111581) and the Red Hat Bugzilla tracking bug (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2554104), so the definitive fix version should be taken from the libblockdev errata published there rather than assumed; administrators should monitor those two pages and apply the libblockdev update for their RHEL 7/8/9/10 release as soon as it ships. Because the root cause is a missing '--' end-of-options separator before the label argument in ntfslabel/fatlabel invocation, the durable fix is an upstream libblockdev code change, and interim hardening should focus on removing the attack path: tighten the polkit/D-Bus policy so that org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem modifications such as Filesystem.SetLabel() require an active administrative authentication instead of being allowed for the local session, which is the most targeted mitigation but will break the 'edit filesystem label' action in GNOME Disks, file managers and similar user-facing tools for non-privileged users. Where label editing by ordinary users is not a business requirement, stopping and masking the udisks2 service (or removing the libblockdev fs/ntfs/vfat helper packages on hosts with no removable-media workflow) eliminates the exposure entirely, at the cost of losing automatic mount, format and eject handling for removable media. Additional compensating steps with narrower side effects include refusing to auto-mount or hand NTFS/VFAT volumes to udisks2 for unprivileged sessions and auditing system D-Bus logs for Filesystem.SetLabel() calls whose label argument begins with a dash, which detects attempted exploitation without altering normal storage behaviour.
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Technical ContextAI · show details
libblockdev is the low-level storage-manipulation library that sits beneath udisks2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux distributions, providing backends such as the fs plugin that shell out to native helpers. The flaw is CWE-88 (Improper Neutralization of Argument Delimiters in a Command), i.e. classic argument/option injection: instead of invoking the helper as 'ntfslabel -- <device> <label>' or 'fatlabel -- <device> <label>', the code passes the caller-supplied label as a bare positional argument and performs no validation for leading dashes, so a label such as '-f' or '--force' is consumed by ntfslabel/fatlabel as an option rather than as data. Because the label originates from a D-Bus caller through udisks2's Filesystem.SetLabel() interface, an unprivileged local user with a session and access to the system bus can drive the invocation; the CVSS vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N confirms the local vector, low-complexity attack, low privileges required, no user interaction, and integrity-only impact that is capped at Low. The affected code is shipped across the whole supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux line (CPE entries for RHEL 7, 8, 9 and 10), so distributions that rebase or backport libblockdev inherit the same helper-invocation pattern.
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Severity by source
AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Reachable only via local authenticated D-Bus session (AV:L, PR:L); crafting a dash-prefixed label is trivial (AC:L); impact is limited unintended filesystem-label operations (I:L, C:N, A:N).
Primary rating from Vendor (redhat).
CVSS VectorVendor: redhat
DescriptionCVE.org
A flaw was found in libblockdev. The bd_fs_ntfs_set_label() and bd_fs_vfat_set_label() functions pass caller-supplied label values as bare positional arguments to the ntfslabel and fatlabel utilities without end-of-options separators or input validation for values beginning with a dash. This allows a label starting with '-' to be interpreted as a command-line flag by the spawned tool, potentially bypassing safety checks or causing unintended operations. This is reachable by unprivileged local users through the udisks2 Filesystem.SetLabel() D-Bus method without administrator authentication.
Threat Intelligence Overview
How this decision was reached
The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.
What every action level means
SSVC AssessmentENISA
Priority Score
Attack Technique
Authentication bypass attacks exploit flaws in the verification mechanisms that control access to systems and applications.
Affected Products (CPE)CVE.org
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