Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2026-72288

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: arm64: vgic: Handle race between interrupt affinity change and LPI disabling Hyunwoo Kim reports some really bad races should the following situation occur: - LPI-I is pending in vcpu-B's AP list - vcpu-A writes to vcpu-B's RD to disable its LPIs - vcpu-C moves I from B to C If the last two race nicely enough, vgic_prune_ap_list() can drop the irq and AP list locks, reacquire them, and in the interval the irq has been freed. UAF follows. The fix is two-fold: - Before dropping the irq and ap_list locks, take a reference on the irq - Do not try to handle migration of the pending bit: there is no expectation that this state is retained, as per the architecture With that, we're sure that the interrupt is still around, and we safely remove it from the AP list as it has no target at this stage (unless another interrupt fires, but that's another story).

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.3 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.002 (8.1th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 8th percentile — 8.1% 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-2026-72288: 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 7.2, 6.18.40, 7.2-rc4

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-72288?
CVE-2026-72288 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 9.3/10. Published 2026-08-15.
How severe is CVE-2026-72288?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.3 out of 10.