Vulnerability in Linux

CVE-2026-74438

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: crypto: sun4i-ss - Remove insecure and unused rng_alg Remove sun4i_ss_rng, as it is insecure and unused: - It has multiple vulnerabilities. sun4i_ss_prng_seed() is missing locking and has a buffer overflow. sun4i_ss_prng_generate() fails to fill the entire buffer with cryptographic random bytes, because it rounds the destination length down and also doesn't actually wait for the hardware to be ready before pulling bytes from it. - No user of this code is known. It's usable only theoretically via the "rng" algorithm type of AF_ALG. But userspace actually just uses the actual Linux RNG (/dev/random etc) instead. And rng_algs don't contribute entropy to the actual Linux RNG either. (This may have been confused with hwrng, which does contribute entropy.) The sun4i_ss_prng_seed() buffer overflow was reported by Tianchu Chen and discovered by Atuin - Automated Vulnerability Discovery Engine There's no point in fixing all these vulnerabilities individually when this is unused code, so let's just remove it.

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 (7.8th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 8th percentile — 7.8% 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-2026-74438: held from 0.001 to 0.002.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.001 · newest: 0.002 · change: +0.001

Affected products

  • Linux — versions b8ae5c7387ad075ee61e8c8774ce2bca46bc9236, 7.2-rc1, 6.6.145

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-74438?
CVE-2026-74438 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux. CVSS score: 7.8/10. Published 2026-08-15.
How severe is CVE-2026-74438?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.8 out of 10.