Bug 2516248 (CVE-2026-72069)

Summary: CVE-2026-72069 kernel: locking/rt: Fix the incorrect RCU protection in rt_spin_unlock()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: rhel-process-autobot, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. The `rt_spin_unlock()` function, and similar real-time (RT) locking mechanisms, incorrectly release Read-Copy-Update (RCU) protection before fully unlocking, leading to a Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability. This issue could allow a local attacker to potentially cause a denial of service or achieve privilege escalation.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 06:02:36 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

locking/rt: Fix the incorrect RCU protection in rt_spin_unlock()

rt_spin_unlock() releases the RCU protection before unlocking the
lock. That opens the door for the following UAF scenario:

 T1					T2
 spin_lock(&p->lock);		rcu_read_lock();
 invalidate(p);			p = rcu_dereference(ptr);
 rcu_assign_pointer(ptr, NULL);	if (!p) return;
 spin_unlock(&p->lock);		spin_lock(&p->lock)
 				   lock(&lock->lock);
				   rcu_read_lock();
 kfree_rcu(p);			rcu_read_unlock();
				....
				spin_unlock(&p->lock)
				  rcu_read_unlock(); // Ends grace period
 rcu_do_batch()
   kfree(p);
			    UAF ->	  rt_mutex_cmpxchg_release(&lock->lock...)

Regular spinlocks keep preemption disabled accross the unlock operation,
which provides full RCU protection, but the RT substitution fails to
resemble that. Same applies for the rwlock substitution.

Move the rcu_read_unlock() invocation past the unlock operations to match
the non-RT semantics. This makes it asymmetric vs. rt_xxx_lock(), but
that's harmless as the caller needs to hold RCU read lock across the lock
operation. The migrate_enable() call stays before the unlock operation
because there is no per CPU operation in the unlock path which would
require migration to be kept disabled.

Comment 5 errata-xmlrpc 2026-09-01 07:30:59 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

Via RHSA-2026:61887 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:61887

Comment 6 errata-xmlrpc 2026-09-04 00:53:11 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Via RHSA-2026:63129 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:63129