CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-98472

Low risk· EPSS 5%
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.17%

5th percentile - higher than 5% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, KVM SEV does not free the "have run CPUs" cpumask during VM destruction if the VM is no longer in SEV mode (e.g. after intra-host migration). This leads to a memory leak.

Risk Assessment

The memory leak when repeatedly creating and destroying SEV VMs can eventually exhaust resources and lead to denial of service.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version with the fix that unconditionally frees the have_run_cpus mask in the VM destroy path.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: SEV: Free have_run_cpus during VM destruction even if VM is no longer SEV Unconditionally free SEV's "have run CPUs" cpumask in the VM destroy path, i.e. even for what appear to be non-SEV VMs, as an SEV VM becomes a non-SEV VM if its state is intra-host migrated. Alternatively, the mask could be freed in sev_migrate_from() when "converting" the source VM, but that gets annoying because ideally KVM would nullify the mask to guard against UAF, and nullifying the mask would need be conditioned on CPUMASK_OFFSTACK=y. Freeing the mask during sev_migrate_from() is also not robust against other KVM bugs, though that's kind of a moot point since any such bugs would show up even if sev->active is never set. I.e. KVM must get that side of things correct. But, that's not a great reason to add more code just to make things marginally less robust.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS