CVE-2026-46066 ceph: fix num_ops off-by-one when crypto allocation fails

What is CVE-2026-46066?

CVE-2026-46066 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 27 May 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

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

ceph: fix num_ops off-by-one when crypto allocation fails

move_dirty_folio_in_page_array() may fail if the file is encrypted, the dirty folio is not the first in the batch, and it fails to allocate a bounce buffer to hold the ciphertext. When that happens, ceph_process_folio_batch() simply redirties the folio and flushes the current batch -- it can retry that folio in a future batch.

However, if this failed folio is not contiguous with the last folio that did make it into the batch, then ceph_process_folio_batch() has already incremented `ceph_wbc->num_ops`; because it doesn't follow through and add the discontiguous folio to the array, ceph_submit_write() -- which expects that `ceph_wbc->num_ops` accurately reflects the number of contiguous ranges (and therefore the required number of "write extent" ops) in the writeback -- will panic the kernel:

BUG_ON(ceph_wbc->op_idx + 1 != req->r_num_ops);

This issue can be reproduced on affected kernels by writing to fscrypt-enabled CephFS file(s) with a 4KiB-written/4KiB-skipped/repeat pattern (total filesize should not matter) and gradually increasing the system's memory pressure until a bounce buffer allocation fails.

Fix this crash by decrementing `ceph_wbc->num_ops` back to the correct value when move_dirty_folio_in_page_array() fails, but the folio already started counting a new (i.e. still-empty) extent.

The defect corrected by this patch has existed since 2022 (see first `Fixes:`), but another bug blocked multi-folio encrypted writeback until recently (see second `Fixes:`). The second commit made it into 6.18.16, 6.19.6, and 7.0-rc1, unmasking the panic in those versions. This patch therefore fixes a regression (panic) introduced by cac190c7674f.

Weakness: CWE-193

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-46066?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-46066?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2026-46066 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-46066 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

• CVE-2026-53266 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2013-6282 Linux Kernel Improper Input Validation Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2022-0185 Linux Kernel Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2013-2094 Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Exploited High 8.4
• CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Exploited High 7.8

All Linux kernel vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as AZL-88704, BELL-CVE-2026-46066, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-46066, GHSA-2hfr-22wv-h4vj, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-13-CVE-2026-46066, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2404-CVE-2026-46066 and 1 more.