CVE-2026-68178

Updated on 10 Aug 2026

Severity

7.8 High severity

Details

CVSS score
7.8
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

misc: nsm: pin the module while the device is open

misc_open() installs a misc driver’s file operations with fops_get(), which pins file_operations::owner before replacing the file’s f_op. The NSM misc device leaves nsm_dev_fops.owner unset, so opening /dev/nsm does not take a module reference on the nsm driver.

If the driver is built as a module, an open file descriptor can therefore survive rmmod of the module that provides its ioctl callbacks. A later ioctl through that descriptor can call into unloaded module text.

Set nsm_dev_fops.owner to THIS_MODULE so the misc core holds the module while any /dev/nsm file descriptor is open, matching the lifetime expectation for the installed file operations.

Details

Affected product:
Debian 10 ELS
Affected packages:
linux @ 4.19.0

Fixes

KernelCare state

Live-patch status from KernelCare for each operating system.

Operating system Status Covered kernels
Debian 13 Planned —
Ubuntu 24.04 Planned —
Ubuntu 24.04 AWS Planned —
Ubuntu 26.04 Will Not Fix —