The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

Patron of June 10

ITScapeHoly card for itscape, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ITS ITScape HOSPES EFFUGIT
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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.

Technical record

Disclosed on
June 10 2026
CVE
CVE-2026-46316
CVSS
9.3
Product
Linux · Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: KVM: arm64: vgic-its: Drop the translation cache reference only for the erased entry vgic_its_invalidate_cache() walks the per-ITS translation cache with xa_for_each() and drops the cache's reference on each entry with vgic_put_irq(). It puts the iterated pointer, though, rather than the value returned by xa_erase(). The function is called from contexts that do not exclude one another: the ITS command handlers hold its_lock, the GITS_CTLR write path holds cmd_lock, and the path that clears EnableLPIs in a redistributor's GICR_CTLR holds neither. Two or more of them can drain the same cache concurrently, and if each one observes the same entry, erases it and then puts it, the single reference the cache holds on that entry is dropped more than once. The entry can then be freed while an ITE still maps it. xa_erase() is atomic and returns the previous entry, so put only the entry that this context actually removed. The cache reference is then dropped exactly once per entry even when the invalidations run concurrently, and the behavior is unchanged when only one context runs.

Sources: github.com

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