CVE-2026-53281
Published: 26 June 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-53281 is a high-severity an unspecified weakness vulnerability in Kernel (inferred from references). Its CVSS base score is 8.8 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068); ranked at the 2.1th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2026-39886
Vulnerability details
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: iommu/vt-d: Avoid NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption Commit 60f030f7418d ("iommu/vt-d: Avoid use of NULL after WARN_ON_ONCE") fixed a NULL pointer dereference in an unlikely situation partly. If dev_pasid is…
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not found in the dev_pasids list, it remains NULL. However, the teardown operations are executed unconditionally, this lead to a NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption. If the domain was never attached to this IOMMU, info will be NULL, which would cause an immediate dereference when checking --info->refcnt. Even if info is not NULL, decrementing the refcount without having removed a valid PASID might unbalance the count. This could lead to premature dropping of the refcount to 0, potentially causing a use-after-free for the remaining active devices sharing the domain. Fix it by returning early if dev_pasid is NULL, before executing the teardown operations. Issue found by AI review and suggested by Kevin Tian. https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260421031347.1408890-1-zhenzhong.duan%40intel.com
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Kernel UAF/NULL deref in IOMMU pasid teardown enables local privilege escalation via crafted device/domain operations.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
No mitigating controls mapped yet. The per-CVE control annotator has not reached this CVE.