Bug 2535049 (CVE-2026-89775)

Summary: CVE-2026-89775 kernel: KVM: arm64: Handle negative S1 walk levels in VNCR TLB size evaluation
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, 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 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for arm64 systems. This issue arises when the system's Memory Management Unit (MMU) is inactive, causing an internal calculation for memory translation buffers (TLB) to misinterpret a negative value. This leads to an incorrect determination of the memory region size for invalidation, resulting in an incomplete cleanup of these buffers. Such an incomplete invalidation could lead to unexpected memory behavior within the virtualized environment.
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-16 08:59:37 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

KVM: arm64: Handle negative S1 walk levels in VNCR TLB size evaluation

Computing the effects of a TLB invalidation involves looking at
the size of the mapping cached by the TLB. For S1 mappings such as
VNCR, this is deducted from the combination of the base granule size
and the mapping level.

However, this implies that the S1 MMU is *on*. When the MMU is off,
we indicate this with the level being set to a "creative" value of
-127 (S1_MMU_DISABLED).

This ends-up being misinterpreted by pgshift_level_to_ttl() as it
doesn't handle negative levels at all (the level is immediately cast
to a u8 and only the bottom two bits considered), leading to an
invalidation size of 0. Not helpful.

Tidy-up pgshift_level_to_ttl() to handle these negative levels, and
ttl_to_size() to always return SZ_1G when no valid TTL is present.
This allows the removal of open-coded checks for similar situations.

Note that the check for a negative value not explicitely checking for
S1_MMU_DISABLED is deliberate, so that actual negative levels introduced
with LVA2 and D128 can take the same path if we ever support them.

Comment 1 Rohit Keshri 2026-09-16 19:28:59 UTC
An attacker can escape to the host after creating an instance that
provides nested virtualization on a multi-tenant arm64 public cloud. On
distributions such as RHEL, /dev/kvm is world-writable (0666), so if
nested virtualization is enabled on the host, an unprivileged user can
use this vulnerability as a reliable LPE to gain root.

Comment 7 Jon Orris 2026-09-28 17:45:14 UTC
This issue has been addressed in the following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

Via RHSA-2026:72624 https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:72624