CVE-2026-46063
MediumCVSS 5.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk1th percentile - higher than 1% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability has been identified in the Linux kernel that may lead to deadlock during sigreturn operations in the context of the shadow stack. The issue arises when the kernel attempts to access shadow stack memory, potentially leading to a situation where two processors try to acquire locks, resulting in a deadlock.
Risk Assessment
Organizations may face availability issues, leading to service interruptions and potential financial losses. In the event of a deadlock, systems may become inaccessible to users.
Recommendation
It is recommended to update the Linux kernel to the latest version that includes fixes for this vulnerability. Additionally, monitoring systems for availability issues is advised.
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn During sigreturn the shadow stack signal frame is popped. The kernel does this by reading the shadow stack using normal read accesses. When it can't assume the memory is shadow stack, it takes extra steps to makes sure it is reading actual shadow stack memory and not other normal readable memory. It does this by holding the mmap read lock while doing the access and checking the flags of the VMA. Unfortunately that is not safe. If the read of the shadow stack sigframe hits a page fault, the fault handler will try to recursively grab another mmap read lock. This normally works ok, but if a writer on another CPU is also waiting, the second read lock could fail and cause a deadlock. Fix this by not holding mmap lock during the read access to userspace. Instead use mmap_lock_speculate_...() to watch for changes between dropping mmap lock and the userspace access. Retry if anything grabbed an mmap write lock in between and could have changed the VMA. These mmap_lock_speculate_...() helpers use mm::mm_lock_seq, which is only available when PER_VMA_LOCK is configured. So make X86_USER_SHADOW_STACK depend on it. On x86, PER_VMA_LOCK is a default configuration for SMP kernels. So drop support for the other configs under the assumption that the !SMP shadow stack user base does not exist. Currently there is a check that skips the lookup work when the SSP can be assumed to be on a shadow stack. While reorganizing the function, remove the optimization to make the tricky code flows more common, such that issues like this cannot escape detection for so long.

