CVE-2026-72069 Affecting kernel-source package, versions <5.14.21-150400.24.240.1


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server security rating.

Threat Intelligence

EPSS
0.74% (53rd percentile)

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  • Snyk IDSNYK-SLES154-KERNELSOURCE-20058415
  • published23 Sept 2026
  • disclosed22 Sept 2026

Introduced: 22 Sep 2026

NewCVE-2026-72069  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Upgrade SLES:15.4 kernel-source to version 5.14.21-150400.24.240.1 or higher.

NVD Description

Note: Versions mentioned in the description apply only to the upstream kernel-source package and not the kernel-source package as distributed by SLES. See How to fix? for SLES:15.4 relevant fixed versions and status.

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

locking/rt: Fix the incorrect RCU protection in rt_spin_unlock()

rt_spin_unlock() releases the RCU protection before unlocking the lock. That opens the door for the following UAF scenario:

T1 T2 spin_lock(&p->lock); rcu_read_lock(); invalidate(p); p = rcu_dereference(ptr); rcu_assign_pointer(ptr, NULL); if (!p) return; spin_unlock(&p->lock); spin_lock(&p->lock) lock(&lock->lock); rcu_read_lock(); kfree_rcu(p); rcu_read_unlock(); .... spin_unlock(&p->lock) rcu_read_unlock(); // Ends grace period rcu_do_batch() kfree(p); UAF -> rt_mutex_cmpxchg_release(&lock->lock...)

Regular spinlocks keep preemption disabled accross the unlock operation, which provides full RCU protection, but the RT substitution fails to resemble that. Same applies for the rwlock substitution.

Move the rcu_read_unlock() invocation past the unlock operations to match the non-RT semantics. This makes it asymmetric vs. rt_xxx_lock(), but that's harmless as the caller needs to hold RCU read lock across the lock operation. The migrate_enable() call stays before the unlock operation because there is no per CPU operation in the unlock path which would require migration to be kept disabled.

CVSS Base Scores

version 3.1