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no cvss —

CVE-2026-93243 json

mm/secretmem: properly account locked pages

published 2026-09-24 45 d ago modified 2026-10-30 9 d ago also EUVD-2026-86249

cvss
—
not scored
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 16%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mm/secretmem: properly account locked pages

secretmem accounts folios by treating memory as if it were mlock()'d and thus limited by the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limit.

However the folios are unevictable and remain so until the inode is evicted, eliminating usual mlock() semantics - mapping folios then unmapping them does not clear their unevictable state, since it depends on AS_UNEVICTABLE, not PG_mlocked.

A user can therefore easily work around the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limit - simply map then unmap and VmLck no longer counts the secretmem range. Worse, folios are not accounted in the process's RSS, meaning the OOM killer won't know to kill the process.

Repeatedly mapping/unmapping (or forking) can then result in the consumption of all available system memory with unevictable folios and cause system instability.

A secretmem fd can be passed between processes and over fork so a per-process limit simply does not make sense, so follow the precedent set by io_uring, perf, skbuff, iommufd and xdp by tracking the number of locked pages in user_struct->locked_vm.

Since the scope tracked is actually inode lifetime, the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK applies per-user not per-process, so it doesn't make sense to bypass for users with CAP_IPC_LOCK, therefore remove this bypass.

There is simply no reason to carry on marking the mapping as mlock()'d since it's misleading and the lifecycle is now correctly handled, so remove this too.

Note that secretmem does not support any form of truncation (including hole punching) and the folios are unreclaimable, so the folios need only be accounted on fault and unaccounted on inode destruction.

__secretmem_account_pages() is more or less a duplicate of the code that io_uring etc. use, but since this is a bug fix that needs backporting, defer any de-duplication efforts to a follow-up.

test_mlock_limit() asserts mlock_future_ok() on mmap(), however this has been removed, so remove the test altogether for the fix. A new test will be sent separately for upstream.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.1.191, 6.6.160, 6.12.113, 6.18.52, 7.2.5, 7.3
  • linux Debian 13 6.12.113-1
  • linux Debian 14 7.2.6-1
  • linux-6.12 Debian 12 6.12.113-1~deb12u1

debian advisories DEBIAN-CVE-2026-93243

  • linux Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42
  • linux-aws Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.17
  • linux-gcp Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1016.18
  • linux-ibm Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.17
  • linux-riscv Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42.1
  • linux-oracle Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1015.16
  • linux-hwe-7.0 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 7.0.0-42.42~24.04.1
  • linux-oem-7.0 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 7.0.0-1017.17

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2026-93243

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-source openSUSE Tumbleweed 7.2.8-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:11893-1

  • kernel Azure Linux 3.0 6.6.161.1-1

azure linux advisories AZL-103787

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-2026-93243 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: mm/secretmem: properly account locked pages

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 5 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-9
    affected: 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 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift/ose-rhel-coreos-8
    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

Exploit prediction

0.25% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 16% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Technology feeds

References

Sources

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