CVE-2026-35345

About vulnerability

A vulnerability in the tail utility of uutils coreutils allows for the exfiltration of sensitive file contents when using the –follow=name option. Unlike GNU tail, the uutils implementation continues to monitor a path after it has been replaced by a symbolic link, subsequently outputting the contents of the link’s target. In environments where a privileged user (e.g., root) monitors a log directory, a local attacker with write access to that directory can replace a log file with a symlink to a sensitive system file (such as /etc/shadow), causing tail to disclose the contents of the sensitive file.

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Alpine Linux 3.18 ELS , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 6 ELS , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , CloudLinux 7 ELS , Oracle Linux 6 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS

Affected packages:

coreutils @ 8.22 (+14 more)

A vulnerability in the tail utility of uutils coreutils allows for the exfiltration of sensitive file contents when using the –follow=name option. Unlike GNU tail, the uutils implementation continues to monitor a path after it has been replaced by a symbolic link, subsequently outputting the contents of the link’s target. In environments where a privileged user (e.g., root) monitors a log directory, a local attacker with write access to that directory can replace a log file with a symlink to a sensitive system file (such as /etc/shadow), causing tail to disclose the contents of the sensitive file.