Bug 2516759 (CVE-2026-74314)

Summary: CVE-2026-74314 kernel: bpf: Cancel special fields on map value recycle
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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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's BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) subsystem. This vulnerability arises from improper handling of special fields during the recycling of map values, which can lead to unsafe destruction operations. Specifically, in tracing programs operating within a Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) context, this resource management issue could result in unexpected system behavior or data integrity problems.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-08-15 06:32:04 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Cancel special fields on map value recycle

Map update and delete paths currently call bpf_obj_free_fields() when a
value is being replaced or recycled. That makes field destruction depend
on the context of the update/delete operation. For tracing programs this
can include NMI context, where referenced kptr destructors, uptr
unpinning, and graph root destruction are not generally safe.

Introduce bpf_obj_cancel_fields() for the reusable-value path. It only
performs NMI-safe cleanup for timer, workqueue, and task_work fields.
Fields that need full destruction are left attached to the recycled value
and are destroyed by the final cleanup path instead.

Switch array and hashtab update/delete/recycle paths to this cancel
helper. Keep bpf_obj_free_fields() for final map destruction and for
bpf_mem_alloc destructors. Preallocated hashtabs do not have allocator
destructors, so teardown continues to walk the normal and extra elements
and fully destroy their fields.

This deliberately relaxes the eager-free semantics of map update/delete
for special fields. Programs that relied on a recycled map slot becoming
empty immediately after update/delete were relying on behavior that
cannot be implemented safely from every BPF execution context without
offloading arbitrary destructors.

There is a chance this change breaks programs making assumptions
regarding the eager freeing of fields. If so, we can relax semantics to
cancellation only when irqs_disabled() is true in the future. However,
theoretically, map values that get reused eagerly already have weaker
guarantees as parallel users can recreate freed fields before the new
element becomes visible again.