Vulnerabilities
- CVSS
- 5.5 Medium
- Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H- EPSS
- 0.17%
- Risk score
- 3.7
- Published
- 2026-08-22
- Status
- Published
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
mm/ptdump: always stabilise against page table freeing using init_mm
Previous commits have established the invariant that kernel page table
freeing is performed while an mmap read lock on init_mm is held, which
fixes races between ptdump and kernel page table freeing over init_mm.
However, x86 and arm64 can perform a ptdump over an mm other than init_mm
via ptdump_walk_pgd() and since kernel memory ranges are shared across
non-kernel mm's, this means that the race still exists for these cases.
Fix this by acquiring a nested mmap write lock for init_mm in
ptdump_walk_pgd().
This is safe as we take this after mmap write locking the mm, and nothing
acquires the init_mm lock first before locking an arbitrary mm, so no
deadlock is possible.
Also update walk_page_range_debug() to assert that init_mm is write
locked, add a comment explaining why and remove some redundant code, and
eliminate the unnecessary and confusing invocation of
walk_kernel_page_table_range().
We can safely remove the non-NULL check for walk.mm, as the mmap lock
asserts would NULL pointer deref if it was (and of course no callers do
this).
The first point at which ptdump can race kernel page table freeing is
commit b6bdb7517c3d ("mm/vmalloc: add interfaces to free unmapped page
table"), so we target this in the Fixes tag.
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's memory management subsystem. A race condition exists in the `ptdump` mechanism, specifically when `ptdump_walk_pgd()` is used on non-initial memory management structures on x86 and arm64 architectures. This allows for a race between `ptdump` and kernel page table freeing, potentially leading to system instability or memory corruption.
Coverage 1
threat-intel
Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel of Debian. These vulnerabilities allow for privilege escalation, data compromise, and denial of service. The affected Debian versions are prior to 6.12.10…
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