CVE-2026-23988: Akeo Rufus

High severity, CVSS 7.0. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Rufus is a utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives. Versions 4.11 and below contain a race condition (TOCTOU) in src/net.c during the creation, validation, and execution of the Fido PowerShell script. Since Rufus runs with elevated privileges (Administrator) but writes the script to the %TEMP% directory (writeable by standard users) without locking the file, a local attacker can replace the legitimate script with a malicious one between the file write operation and the execution step. This allows arbitrary code execution with Administrator privileges. This issue has been fixed in version 4.12_BETA.

Affected products

• Akeo Rufus: before 4.12 (fixed in 4.12)

Published 2026-01-22. Last modified 2026-06-17.