CVE-2026-43472

About vulnerability

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

unshare: fix unshare_fs() handling

There’s an unpleasant corner case in unshare(2), when we have a CLONE_NEWNS in flags and current->fs hadn’t been shared at all; in that case copy_mnt_ns() gets passed current->fs instead of a private copy, which causes interesting warts in proof of correctness]

I guess if private means fs->users == 1, the condition could still be true.

Unfortunately, it’s worse than just a convoluted proof of correctness. Consider the case when we have CLONE_NEWCGROUP in addition to CLONE_NEWNS (and current->fs->users == 1).

We pass current->fs to copy_mnt_ns(), all right. Suppose it succeeds and flips current->fs->{pwd,root} to corresponding locations in the new namespace. Now we proceed to copy_cgroup_ns(), which fails (e.g. with -ENOMEM). We call put_mnt_ns() on the namespace created by copy_mnt_ns(), it’s destroyed and its mount tree is dissolved, but… current->fs->root and current->fs->pwd are both left pointing to now detached mounts.

They are pinning those, so it’s not a UAF, but it leaves the calling process with unshare(2) failing with -ENOMEM and leaving it with pwd and root on detached isolated mounts. The last part is clearly a bug.

There is other fun related to that mess (races with pivot_root(), including the one between pivot_root() and fork(), of all things), but this one is easy to isolate and fix - treat CLONE_NEWNS as “allocate a new fs_struct even if it hadn’t been shared in the first place”. Sure, we could go for something like “if both CLONE_NEWNS and one of the things that might end up failing after copy_mnt_ns() call in create_new_namespaces() are set, force allocation of new fs_struct”, but let’s keep it simple - the cost of copy_fs_struct() is trivial.

Another benefit is that copy_mnt_ns() with CLONE_NEWNS always gets a freshly allocated fs_struct, yet to be attached to anything. That seriously simplifies the analysis…

FWIW, that bug had been there since the introduction of unshare(2) ;-/

Affected product:

AlmaLinux 9.2 ESU , Amazon Linux 2 ELS , CentOS 6 ELS , CentOS 7 ELS , CentOS 8.4 ELS , CentOS 8.5 ELS , CentOS Stream 8 ELS , CloudLinux 7 ELS , Debian 10 ELS , Oracle Linux 6 ELS , Oracle Linux 7 ELS , RHEL 7 ELS , TuxCare 9.6 ESU , Ubuntu 16.04 ELS , Ubuntu 18.04 ELS , Ubuntu 20.04 ELS

Affected packages:

kernel @ 4.18.0 (+18 more)

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.