{
  "affected": [
    {
      "ecosystem_specific": {
        "urgency": "not yet assigned"
      },
      "package": {
        "ecosystem": "Debian:12",
        "name": "packagekit"
      },
      "ranges": [
        {
          "events": [
            {
              "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
              "fixed": "1.2.6-5+deb12u1"
            }
          ],
          "type": "ECOSYSTEM"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "ecosystem_specific": {
        "urgency": "not yet assigned"
      },
      "package": {
        "ecosystem": "Debian:13",
        "name": "packagekit"
      },
      "ranges": [
        {
          "events": [
            {
              "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
              "fixed": "1.3.1-1+deb13u1"
            }
          ],
          "type": "ECOSYSTEM"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "ecosystem_specific": {
        "urgency": "not yet assigned"
      },
      "package": {
        "ecosystem": "Debian:14",
        "name": "packagekit"
      },
      "ranges": [
        {
          "events": [
            {
              "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
              "fixed": "1.3.5-1"
            }
          ],
          "type": "ECOSYSTEM"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "details": "PackageKit is a a D-Bus abstraction layer that allows the user to manage packages in a secure way using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API. PackageKit between and including versions 1.0.2 and 1.3.4 is vulnerable to a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition on transaction flags that allows unprivileged users to install packages as root and thus leads to a local privilege escalation. This is patched in version 1.3.5.  A local unprivileged user can install arbitrary RPM packages as root, including executing RPM scriptlets, without authentication. The vulnerability is a TOCTOU race condition on `transaction-\u003ecached_transaction_flags`  combined with a silent state-machine guard that discards illegal backward transitions while leaving corrupted flags in place. Three bugs exist in `src/pk-transaction.c`: 1. Unconditional flag overwrite (line 4036): `InstallFiles()` writes caller-supplied flags to `transaction-\u003ecached_transaction_flags` without checking whether the transaction has already been  authorized/started. A second call blindly overwrites the flags even while the transaction is RUNNING. 2. Silent state-transition rejection (lines 873–882): `pk_transaction_set_state()` silently discards backward state transitions (e.g. `RUNNING` → `WAITING_FOR_AUTH`) but the flag overwrite at step 1 already happened. The transaction continues running with corrupted flags. 3. Late flag read at execution time (lines 2273–2277): The scheduler's idle callback reads cached_transaction_flags at dispatch time, not at authorization time. If flags were overwritten between authorization and execution, the backend sees the attacker's flags.",
  "id": "DEBIAN-CVE-2026-41651",
  "modified": "2026-09-14T16:47:47.193349331Z",
  "published": "2026-04-22T14:17:04.617Z",
  "references": [
    {
      "type": "ADVISORY",
      "url": "https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-41651"
    }
  ],
  "severity": [
    {
      "score": "CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H",
      "type": "CVSS_V3"
    }
  ],
  "upstream": [
    "CVE-2026-41651"
  ]
}