Skip to main content
← All vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-22701PYSEC-2026-1374GHSA-QMGC-5H2G-MVRW

filelock Time-of-Check-Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) Symlink Vulnerability in SoftFileLock

Published
Last modified
published
Not listed in CISA KEV
Fix
Fixed in 3.20.3
None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
  • Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical impact: partial

Summary

filelock is a platform-independent file lock for Python. Prior to version 3.20.3, a TOCTOU race condition vulnerability exists in the SoftFileLock implementation of the filelock package. An attacker with local filesystem access and permission to create symlinks can exploit a race condition between the permission validation and file creation to cause lock operations to fail or behave unexpectedly. The vulnerability occurs in the _acquire() method between raise_on_not_writable_file() (permission check) and os.open() (file creation). During this race window, an attacker can create a symlink at the lock file path, potentially causing the lock to operate on an unintended target file or leading to denial of service. This issue has been patched in version 3.20.3.

Timeline

  1. CVE published
  2. CISA SSVC assessment

    Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

  3. Record last updated

Affected versions

  • tox-dev filelock

    fixed in 3.20.3

  • filelockPyPI

    fixed in 3.20.3

References 3

GitHub · tox-dev/filelock