CVE-2026-53359
Received
Received - Intake
KVM: x86 Shadow Paging Use-After-Free Vulnerability
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-53359, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-07-04
Last updated on: 2026-07-04
Assigner: kernel.org
Description
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
KVM: x86: Fix shadow paging use-after-free due to unexpected role
Commit 0cb2af2ea66ad ("KVM: x86: Fix shadow paging use-after-free due
to unexpected GFN") fixed a shadow paging mismatch between stored and
computed GFNs; the bug could be triggered by changing a PDE mapping from
outside the guest, and then deleting a memslot. The rmap_remove()
call would miss entries created after the PDE change because the GFN
of the leaf SPTE does not match the GFN of the struct kvm_mmu_page.
A similar hole however remains if the modified PDE points to a non-leaf
page. In this case the gfn can be made to match, but the role does not
match: the original large 2MB page creates a kvm_mmu_page with direct=1,
while the new 4KB needs a kvm_mmu_page with direct=0. However,
kvm_mmu_get_child_sp() does not compare the role, and therefore reuses
the page.
The next step is installing a leaf (4KB) SPTE on the new path which
records an rmap entry under the gfn resolved by the walk. But when
that child is zapped its parent kvm_mmu_page has direct=1 and
kvm_mmu_page_get_gfn() computes the gfn for the 4KB page as
sp->gfn + index instead of using sp->shadowed_translation[] (or sp->gfns[]
in older kernels). It therefore fails to remove the recorded entry.
When the memslot is dropped the shadow page is freed but the rmap
entry survives, as in the scenario that was already fixed. Code that
later walks that gfn (dirty logging, MMU notifier invalidation, and
so on) dereferences an sptep that lies in the freed page, causing the
use-after-free.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | * |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
