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

Published · last modified .

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.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (6.2th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 6th percentile — 6.2% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-46280: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.002 · change: 0.000

Affected products

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.