Bug 2492280 (CVE-2026-52959)

Summary: CVE-2026-52959 kernel: virt: sev-guest: Do not use host-controlled page order in cleanup path
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) guest module. This vulnerability allows a malicious host to provide an invalid buffer size during an extended guest request. This incorrect handling of host-controlled page order during the cleanup process can lead to a mismatch between the allocated and freed buffer sizes, potentially resulting in corruption within the page allocator. This corruption could lead to system instability or a denial of service.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-06-24 18:02:50 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

virt: sev-guest: Do not use host-controlled page order in cleanup path

When issuing an extended guest request (SVM_VMGEXIT_EXT_GUEST_REQUEST),
get_ext_report() allocates a buffer to retrieve a certificate blob from the
host, keeping track of its size in report_req->certs_len.

However, the host may return SNP_GUEST_VMM_ERR_INVALID_LEN, indicating
an invalid buffer size, as well as the expected length of such buffer.
get_ext_report() subsequently updates report_req->certs_len with the
host-controlled value, and cleans up the buffer by computing a page order
from such value. This is incorrect, as the host-provided length may not
match the page order of the original allocation, potentially resulting
in corruption in the page allocator.

Fix this by using alloc_pages_exact() instead, and reusing @npages to
compute the size passed to free_pages_exact(). For consistency, also
use @npages to compute the size when allocating the pages, even though
this last change has no functional effect.

Comment 1 Mauro Matteo Cascella 2026-06-25 14:51:45 UTC
Upstream advisory:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2026062436-CVE-2026-52959-1796@gregkh/T