CVE-2026-43303

Medium

Elevated severity or exploit probability.

CVSS base

7.8 HIGH

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

EPSS — probability of exploitation (30 days)

0.2%

6.2th percentile

CISA KEV

Not listed

Weakness / dates

CWE-416

Published 2026-05-08 · modified 2026-09-08

CVSS breakdown

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

Attack Vector	L	Local
Attack Complexity	L	Low
Privileges Required	L	Low
User Interaction	N	None
Scope	U	Unchanged
Confidentiality	H	High
Integrity	H	High
Availability	H	High

Timeline

2026-05-08 — Published (NVD)
2026-09-08 — Last modified (NVD)

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/page_alloc: clear page->private in free_pages_prepare() Several subsystems (slub, shmem, ttm, etc.) use page->private but don't clear it before freeing pages. When these pages are later allocated as high-order pages and split via split_page(), tail pages retain stale page->private values. This causes a use-after-free in the swap subsystem. The swap code uses page->private to track swap count continuations, assuming freshly allocated pages have page->private == 0. When stale values are present, swap_count_continued() incorrectly assumes the continuation list is valid and iterates over uninitialized page->lru containing LIST_POISON values, causing a crash: KASAN: maybe wild-memory-access in range [0xdead000000000100-0xdead000000000107] RIP: 0010:__do_sys_swapoff+0x1151/0x1860 Fix this by clearing page->private in free_pages_prepare(), ensuring all freed pages have clean state regardless of previous use.

Affected

linux

References

Official: NVD · CVE.org