Use After Free in Linux
CVE-2026-46280
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: lib: test_hmm: evict device pages on file close to avoid use-after-free Patch series "Minor hmm_test fixes and cleanups". Two bugfixes a cleanup for the HMM kernel selftests. These were mostly reported by Zenghui Yu with special thanks to Lorenzo for analysing and pointing out the problems. This patch (of 3): When dmirror_fops_release() is called it frees the dmirror struct but doesn't migrate device private pages back to system memory first. This leaves those pages with a dangling zone_device_data pointer to the freed dmirror. If a subsequent fault occurs on those pages (eg. during coredump) the dmirror_devmem_fault() callback dereferences the stale pointer causing a kernel panic. This was reported [1] when running mm/ksft_hmm.sh on arm64, where a test failure triggered SIGABRT and the resulting coredump walked the VMAs faulting in the stale device private pages. Fix this by calling dmirror_device_evict_chunk() for each devmem chunk in dmirror_fops_release() to migrate all device private pages back to system memory before freeing the dmirror struct. The function is moved earlier in the file to avoid a forward declaration.
Vulnerability class: Use-After-Free
EPSS: 0.001 (2.5th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 7.8 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.
Affected products
- Linux — versions 7.1, 6.12.86, 7.0.4
- Linux Linux_kernel
Weakness classification (CWE)
References
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-46280?
- CVE-2026-46280 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, classified under Use After Free. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2026-06-08.
- How severe is CVE-2026-46280?
- High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.