CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-98927

HighCVSS 7.0
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.21%

11th percentile - higher than 11% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the Linux kernel, KVM on arm64 (nv) fixed the life cycle of the nested_mmus array. The array holding shadow page tables could be relocated during VCPU_INIT while another vCPU was running, leaving a dangling pointer to freed memory.

Risk Assessment

A use-after-free could cause VM or host system crashes, especially in nested virtualization environments.

Recommendation

Update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix that changes the array of structures to an array of pointers allocated at VM creation. This ensures stable nested virtualization operation.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: arm64: nv: Fix life cycle of the nested_mmus array The nested_mmus array holds the shadow page tables that are used when a guest is running a nested context. These structures are allocated on VCPU_INIT for whole guest, which implies that they may have to be relocated as the array grows. Should a VCPU_INIT occur whilst a vcpu is actively running an L2 and that the allocation requires relocation, that vcpu will still be running with a pointer to the previous structure, which will have been freed. Fix this by turning the array of structures to an array of pointers, which is now allocated at VM creation, sized to the absolute maximum that KVM can handle. In turn, each VCPU_INIT contributes S2_MMU_PER_VCPU to the pool. No reallocation is ever performed, and the life cycle of each object is much clearer: - the nested_mmus array is allocated in kvm_init_nested(), and freed in kvm_arch_destroy_vm() - s2_mmu structures are allocated in kvm_vcpu_init_nested(), and freed on kvm_arch_flush_shadow_all() Finally, the freeing of vcpu->arch.vncr_array is made consistent rather than being done on some failure paths, but not others.

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