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CVE-2026-64561

8.8 HIGHpublic exploit available

Published 2026-08-04 · Updated 2026-08-09

AI risk analysis

Summary
This flaw allows an attacker to cause a kernel memory corruption by exploiting an invalid root page fault after MMU pages are made available for the shadow MMU, potentially leading to a system crash or privilege escalation.
Exploitability
Exploitation requires specific conditions, including the presence of an invalid or obsolete root page, making it moderately difficult. The attacker must have the ability to trigger a page fault under these conditions.
Blast radius
If exploited, the impact could be severe, potentially leading to a system crash or privilege escalation, affecting the stability and security of the system.
Detection
No reliable host or network indicator is derivable from the published description.
Prioritized remediation
Upgrade to the fixed version 5.10.104 or later.
kernelmemory-corruptionprivilege-escalation

Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

NVD description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: x86: Check for invalid/obsolete root *after* making MMU pages available Check for a "stale" page fault, i.e. for an invalid and/or obsolete root, after making MMU pages available for the shadow MMU. If reclaiming shadow pages zaps an in-use root, i.e. marks it invalid, then KVM will attempt to map memory into an invalid root. On its own, populating an invalid root is "fine", but because child shadow pages inherit their parent's role, any children created during the map/fetch will be created as invalid pages, thus violating KVM's invariant that invalid pages are never on the list of active MMU pages. Note, the underlying flaw has existed since KVM first started tracking invalid roots in 2008 (commit 2e53d63acba7, "KVM: MMU: ignore zapped root pagetables"), but the true badness only came along in 2020 (Linux 5.9) with the invariant that invalid shadow pages can't be on the list of active pages. Note #2, inheriting role.invalid when creating child shadow pages is also far from ideal; that flaw will be addressed separately.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Public exploit & PoC references

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.

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