CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-63827

HighCVSS 7.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.12%

3th percentile - higher than 3% of all known CVEs

Summary

A use-after-free vulnerability was found in the rawdata deduplication loop of the AppArmor module in the Linux kernel. The issue occurs when an entry on the rawdata_list has a zero reference count and aa_get_profile_loaddata() performs an unsafe kref_get(), leading to a reference to freed memory.

Risk Assessment

A local attacker could exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges or cause a denial of service (DoS) by intentionally triggering a race condition during AppArmor profile loading, potentially compromising system integrity.

Recommendation

Immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit introducing the aa_get_profile_loaddata_not0() function). For production systems, apply the security patch from your distributor.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

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Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: apparmor: fix use-after-free in rawdata dedup loop aa_replace_profiles() walks ns->rawdata_list to dedup the incoming policy blob against entries already attached to existing profiles. Per the kernel-doc on struct aa_loaddata, list membership does not hold a reference: profiles hold pcount, and when the last pcount drops, do_ploaddata_rmfs() is queued on a workqueue that takes ns->lock and removes the entry. Between dropping the last pcount and the workqueue running, an entry remains on the list with pcount == 0. aa_get_profile_loaddata() is an unconditional kref_get() on pcount, so when the dedup loop hits such an entry, refcount hardening reports refcount_t: addition on 0; use-after-free. inside aa_replace_profiles(), and the poisoned counter then trips "saturated" and "underflow" warnings on the subsequent uses of the same loaddata. Before commit a0b7091c4de4 ("apparmor: fix race on rawdata dereference") the dedup path used a get_unless_zero-style helper on a single counter, so the existing "if (tmp)" guard was meaningful. The split-refcount refactor introduced aa_get_profile_loaddata(), which has plain kref_get() semantics, and the guard quietly became a no-op. Introduce aa_get_profile_loaddata_not0(), matching the existing _not0 convention used by aa_get_profile_not0(), and use it for the rawdata_list dedup lookup so dying entries are skipped. Reproduced on x86_64 with v7.1-rc5 in QEMU+KVM running Ubuntu 24.04 + stress-ng 0.17.06: stress-ng --apparmor 1 --klog-check --timeout 60s Without this patch the three refcount_t warnings fire within a few seconds. With it the same 60 s run is clean. Coverage is a smoke-test only; a longer soak with CONFIG_KASAN, CONFIG_KCSAN and CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING would be welcome from anyone with the cycles.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS