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Fencer Vulns
no cvss —

CVE-2026-74658 json

futex: Prevent robust futex exit race some more

published 2026-08-22 2 mo ago modified 2026-11-06 2 d ago also EUVD-2026-64595

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 7%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

futex: Prevent robust futex exit race some more

A robust futex unlock stores 0 over the whole futex value - wiping FUTEX_WAITERS - and wakes a single waiter. That wakeup is a one-shot notification: the protocol relies on its recipient to either acquire the futex (and eventually unlock while aware of the remaining contention) or re-arm FUTEX_WAITERS before sleeping again. If the woken waiter is killed before it can do either, the kernel must jump in and wake the next task down the line.

This is a known complication of the futex protocol with a previous partial fix in commit ca16d5bee598 ("futex: Prevent robust futex exit race"). Unfortunately, that fix is insufficient.

If a third task re-acquired the futex through the uncontended fast path in the meantime, the notification is lost: robust exit processing sees that it is owned by another task and does nothing, while the new owner sees no FUTEX_WAITERS when it unlocks and wakes nobody. The remaining waiters sleep forever behind a free futex:

A owns the futex, B and C sleep in FUTEX_WAIT uval == A | FUTEX_WAITERS A robust unlock: store 0, FUTEX_WAKE(1) wakes B uval == 0 D fast path acquire: cmpxchg(0 -> D) uval == D, no FUTEX_WAITERS B killed before acting on the wakeup B exit walk, pending op: owner D != B -> no action D unlock: no FUTEX_WAITERS -> no wake C sleeps forever

This is clearly a shortcoming in the implementation, which fails to keep the FUTEX_WAITERS bit consistent.

Work around this by augmenting the robust list exit processing to also perform the extra wakeup if the futex word is owned by another thread but FUTEX_WAITERS is not set.

This does not fix the problem of a non-contended take over/release and free sequence, which has been discussed for years and has been addressed by commit 3ca9595d9fb6 ("futex: Add support for unlocking robust futexes") and subsequent changes, but failed to take the problem described above into account.

A more complete solution which is based on the in kernel unlock of contended robust futexes has been discussed in the context of this change and should show up in mainline sooner than later.

[ tglx: Amend change log slightly and fixup coding style ]

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 3.17, 4.10, 4.15, 4.20, 5.4, 5.5, 5.10.265, 5.15.216, 6.1.183, 6.6.152, 6.12.104, 6.18.45, 7.1.9, 7.2
  • linux Debian 12 6.1.187-1
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.105-1
  • linux Debian 14 7.1.9-1
  • linux-6.12 Debian 12 6.12.107-1~deb12u1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-74658

  • linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-198.208
  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1117.124
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.17
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1118.128
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.18
  • linux-gke Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1113.119
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 5.15.0-1111.115

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-74658

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

  • kernel Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.152.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-97287

Azure Linux vulnerability data, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, from https://github.com/microsoft/AzureLinuxVulnerabilityData via OSV, under the MIT licence; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. MIT

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-74658 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: futex: Prevent robust futex exit race some more

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: workaround, no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.18% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 7% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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