Linux bitten by second severe vulnerability in as many weeks
Linux bitten by second severe vulnerability in as many weeks
Publish Date: 2026-05-11 18:28:00
Source Domain: arstechnica.com
Both privilege escalation vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the kernel’s handling of page caches stored in memory, allowing untrusted users to modify them. They target caches in networking and memory-fragment handling components. Specifically, CVE-2026-43284 attacks the esp4 and esp6 () processes, and CVE-2026-43500 zeroes in on rxrpc. Last week’s CopyFail exploited faulty page caching in the authencesn AEAD template process, which is used for IPsec extended sequence numbers. A 2022 vulnerability named Dirty Pipe also stemmed from flaws that allow attackers to overwrite page caches.
Researchers from security firm Automox wrote:
Dirty Frag belongs to the same bug family as Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail, but it targets the frag member of the kernel’s struct sk_buff rather than pipe_buffer. The exploit uses splice() to plant a reference to a read-only page-cache page (for example, /etc/passwd or /usr/bin/su) into the frag slot of a sender-side skb. Receiver-side kernel code then performs in-place cryptographic operations on that frag, modifying the page cache in RAM. Every subsequent read of the file sees the corrupted version, even though the attacker only ever had read access.
CVE-2026-43284 is found in the esp_input() process on the IPsec ESP receive path. When an skb object is non-linear but lacks a frag list, the code skips skb_cow_data() and decrypts AEAD in place on the planted frag. From there, an attacker can control the file offset and the 4-byte value of each store.
CVE-2026-43500, meanwhile, resides in rxkad_verify_packet_1(). The process decrypts RxRPC payloads using a single-block process. Splice-pinned pages become both a source and destination. That, paired with the decryption key being freely extracted using the add_key (rxrpc), allows an attacker to rewrite contents in memory.
Either exploit used separately is unreliable. Some Ubuntu configurations use AppArmor to prevent untrusted users from creating namespace contents….
