CVE-2026-46274

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

io-wq: check that the predecessor is hashed in io_wq_remove_pending()

io_wq_remove_pending() needs to fix up wq->hash_tail[] if the cancelled work was the tail of its hash bucket. When doing this, it checks whether the preceding entry in acct->work_list has the same hash value, but never checks that the predecessor is hashed at all. io_get_work_hash() is simply atomic_read(&work->flags) » IO_WQ_HASH_SHIFT, and the hash bits are never set for non-hashed work, so it returns 0. Thus, when a hashed bucket-0 work is cancelled while a non-hashed work is its list predecessor, the check spuriously passes and a pointer to the non-hashed io_kiocb is stored in wq->hash_tail[0].

Because non-hashed work is dequeued via the fast path in io_get_next_work(), which never touches hash_tail[], the stale pointer is never cleared. Therefore, after the non-hashed io_kiocb completes and is freed back to req_cachep, wq->hash_tail[0] is a dangling pointer. The io_wq is per-task (tctx->io_wq) and survives ring open/close, so the dangling pointer persists for the lifetime of the task; the next hashed bucket-0 enqueue dereferences it in io_wq_insert_work() and wq_list_add_after() writes through freed memory.

Add the missing io_wq_is_hashed() check so a non-hashed predecessor never inherits a hash_tail[] slot.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/252c5051dba9c709b6a72f2866f93e5e618b3f06
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5a20ebf0c81b61f5ea3b1b529c100cad69b9f603
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d376c131af7c7739a87ff037ed2fdb67c2542c8a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d6a2d7b04b5a093021a7a0e2e69e9d5237dfa8cc
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d6bda9df0c0a3080804181464d5c0f4d78a4e769