Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2026-72279

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: arm64: nv: Respect read-only PFN when mapping L1 VNCR KVM currently maps the L1 VNCR into the host stage-1 by relying entirely on the permissions of the guest stage-1. At the same time, it is entirely possible that the backing PFN is read-only (e.g. RO memslot), meaning that the L1 VNCR should use at most a read-only mapping. Cache the writability of the PFN in the VNCR TLB and use it to constrain the resulting fixmap permissions. Promote VNCR permission faults to an SEA in the case where the guest attempts to write to a read-only endpoint. Conveniently, this also plugs a page leak found by Sashiko [*] resulting from the early return for a read-only PFN.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.0 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (7.6th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 8th percentile — 7.6% 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-2026-72279: held from 0.002 to 0.002.

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

Affected products

  • Linux — versions 6.16, 7.2, 6.18.40

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-72279?
CVE-2026-72279 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 9.0/10. Published 2026-08-15.
How severe is CVE-2026-72279?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.0 out of 10.