Use After Free Affecting torvalds/linux package, versions [5.4.24,5.5)[5.5.8,5.6)[5.6,6.12.97)[6.13,6.18.40)[6.19,7.1.5)
Threat Intelligence
The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model, and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. The percentile measures the EPSS probability relative to all known EPSS scores. Note: This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. Check out the EPSS documentation for more details.
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Test your applications- Snyk IDSNYK-UNMANAGED-TORVALDSLINUX-20812394
- published11 Oct 2026
- disclosed15 Aug 2026
- creditUnknown
Introduced: 15 Aug 2026
CVE-2026-72434 (opens in a new tab)How to fix?
Upgrade torvalds/linux to version 5.5, 5.6, 6.12.97, 6.18.40, 7.1.5 or higher.
Overview
Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Use After Free in the gc process. An attacker can achieve local privilege escalation, kernel memory disclosure, and potential denial of service by exploiting a use-after-free condition through orchestrated creation and destruction of ipsets with timeouts via netlink commands while the garbage collection workqueue is active. This is only exploitable if the attacker has CAP_NET_ADMIN privileges, which can be obtained in an isolated user and network namespace.
Note: The Linux kernel project assigns a CVE to every bug fix it ships, whether or not the bug has been shown to be exploitable. This advisory was generated from that process and has not been individually assessed for exploitability. See the kernel's CVE process documentation: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/cve.rst