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Saint ITScape, Who Escaped the ARM Virtual Machine
Patron of KVM hypervisors on arm64, reference counters, and pointers taken from the wrong hand.
Life
In June 2026 Hyunwoo Kim (v4bel) revealed a race condition in KVM's emulation of the arm64 Interrupt Translation Service. When flushing the translation cache, the kernel dropped the reference on the pointer it was iterating rather than on the one it had just erased, and from concurrent contexts the two did not always match. The result was a use-after-free that a guest with root could exploit to run commands as root on the host.
Prayer
O Saint ITScape, who leaves the virtual cage by way of the interrupts, let our hypervisors release only what they removed. Amen.
How to celebrate
Celebrated by updating the kernel on arm64 KVM hosts and counting references twice, like your change.
Drop the wrong reference, and the guest takes its leave.