Bug 2541360 (CVE-2026-98116) - CVE-2026-98116 kernel: ALSA: pcm: Serialize PCM mmap with buffer reallocation to fix page UAF
Summary: CVE-2026-98116 kernel: ALSA: pcm: Serialize PCM mmap with buffer reallocation...
Keywords:
Status: NEW
Alias: CVE-2026-98116
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Product Security DevOps Team
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2026-09-25 11:34 UTC by OSIDB Bzimport
Modified: 2026-09-28 12:43 UTC (History)
17 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-25 11:34:10 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ALSA: pcm: Serialize PCM mmap with buffer reallocation to fix page UAF

snd_pcm_hw_params() and snd_pcm_hw_free() guard buffer reallocation
with an mmap_count check performed under the PCM stream lock, but the
lock is released long before the buffer is actually freed:
snd_pcm_sync_stop(), constraint refinement and do_free_pages() all
happen in between.  snd_pcm_mmap_data(), on the other hand, takes no
lock at all: it validates against the old buffer's state and
dma_bytes, remaps its pages into the VMA, and only then increments
mmap_count.

A concurrent mmap() can therefore slip in between the check and the
free.  remap_pfn_range() installs writable PTEs for the old buffer's
pages without taking page references, and the subsequent
do_free_pages() returns those pages to the page allocator while the
VMA still maps them.  This leaves a stale, writable mapping of freed
pages: a page-level use-after-free that can be leveraged for local
privilege escalation.

Make snd_pcm_mmap_data() participate in the buffer-access scheme
introduced for hw_params/hw_free: acquire runtime->buffer_accessing
before validating and remapping, and release it afterwards.  Buffer
reallocation already fails with -EBUSY while accessors are active,
and the mmap side now fails with -EBUSY while a reallocation is in
progress, so the validate/remap sequence and the check/free sequence
can no longer interleave.

A reproducer that turns this race into a stale writable mapping of
the freed DMA buffer pages is available on request.


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