Vulnerability in Linux
CVE-2026-64294
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap Ever since idmapped mounts were introduced, inode ownership checks (for side-channel protection) in mincore() and madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) were done against the nop_mnt_idmap, which completely ignores the file's mount's idmap. This results in odd edgecases like: 1) mount/bind-mount with an idmap userA:userB:1 2) userB runs an owner_or_capable() check on file that is owned by userA on-disk/in-memory, but owned by userB after idmap translation 3) owner_or_capable() mysteriously fails as the correct idmap wasn't supplied In the case of mincore/madvise MADV_PAGEOUT, this is usually benign, because file_permission(file, MAY_WRITE) will probably succeed, as it uses the proper idmap internally, but it does not need to be the case on e.g a 0444 file where even the owner itself doesn't have permissions to write to it. Since this is clearly not trivial to get right, introduce a file_owner_or_capable() that can carry the correct semantics, and switch the various users in mm to it. The issue was found by manual code inspection & an off-list discussion with Jan Kara.
EPSS: 0.002 (5.5th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.
CVSS v3 metric
CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.
Affected products
- Linux — versions 6.6.145, 7.2, 6.12.96
- Linux Linux_kernel — versions 7.2
References
Frequently asked questions
- What is CVE-2026-64294?
- CVE-2026-64294 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2026-07-25.
- How severe is CVE-2026-64294?
- Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.