CVE-2026-64561

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 parents role, any children created during the map/fetch will be created as invalid pages, thus violating KVMs 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 cant 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.

Affected Software

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0026dbb7de8ea76e97d6edf42fc3cc084564e2bf
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2abd5287f08319fa35764566b15c6e22cb1068db
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/35e77467610c4a37cb0ff54ee56b85f73b1f5700
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bce0d3c26e2c761a4bf43c8949f333fc7374eb2d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f3477a6a4164f15287444eda685b5f6405dbd1e5
• https://github.com/V4bel/Zapscape