CVE-2026-72094
Received
Received - Intake
NULL Pointer Dereference in Linux Kernel DMA-BUF
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-72094, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-15
Last updated on: 2026-08-15
Assigner: kernel.org
Description
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
dma-buf: dma-fence: Fix potential NULL pointer dereference
The commit mentioned in the fixes tag below introduced a mechanism
through which fence producers can fully decouple from fence consumers.
This, desirable, mechanism is based on the fence's signaled-bit as the
"decoupling point".
A sophisticated interaction between RCU and atomic instructions attempts
to ensure that fence consumers can still interact with fence producers
through the dma_fence_ops (callback pointers into the producer).
This is the desired behavior: to check for decoupling, the signaled-bit
is first checked. If it's not yet signaled, RCU ensures that the ops
pointer cannot yet be NULL.
Hereby, dma_fence_signal_timestamp_locked() first sets the signaled-bit,
and then sets the ops pointer to NULL. Readers first load the ops
pointer, and then check through the signaled-bit whether the pointer can
legally be accessed.
These set and load operations could occur out of order on weakly ordered
platforms. This problem can be solved very elegantly by using the ops
pointer itself as the synchronization point. The pointer is either NULL,
or cannot become NULL while it is being used thanks to RCU.
Replace the signaled-bit check in dma_fence_timeline_name() and
dma_fence_driver_name().
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | * |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
