Bug 2516387 (CVE-2026-68462)

Summary: CVE-2026-68462 kernel: bpf: Reject negative const offsets for buffer pointers
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
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. The BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) verifier, responsible for ensuring the safety of BPF programs, incorrectly processed negative constant offsets when accessing buffer pointers. This oversight could allow a local attacker to craft a malicious BPF program that bypasses memory access restrictions. Such a bypass could lead to unauthorized reading or writing of memory, potentially resulting in information disclosure or privilege escalation within the system.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 06:09:49 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Reject negative const offsets for buffer pointers

The verifier rejects variable offsets for PTR_TO_TP_BUFFER and PTR_TO_BUF
accesses, but it currently accepts a constant negative offset produced by
pointer arithmetic.

Commit 022ac0750883 ("bpf: use reg->var_off instead of reg->off for
pointers") moved constant pointer offsets from reg->off to reg->var_off.
However, __check_buffer_access() continued to check only the instruction
offset. An access with reg->var_off equal to -8 and an instruction offset
of zero therefore passes verification.

For writable raw tracepoints, the access end is also calculated from the
unsigned reg->var_off.value. An eight-byte access starting at -8 wraps
the calculated end to zero, allowing the program to load and attach
without increasing max_tp_access.

After ensuring that reg->var_off is constant, calculate the effective
access start using signed arithmetic and reject it when it is negative.
Use the validated start to calculate the access end for both
PTR_TO_TP_BUFFER and PTR_TO_BUF.