CVE-2026-64294 mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap

What is CVE-2026-64294?

CVE-2026-64294 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 25 Jul 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:

mm: do file ownership checks with the proper mount idmap

Ever since idmapped mounts were introduced, inode ownership checks (for side-channel protection) in mincore() and madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT) were done against the nop_mnt_idmap, which completely ignores the file's mount's idmap. This results in odd edgecases like:

1) mount/bind-mount with an idmap userA:userB:1 2) userB runs an owner_or_capable() check on file that is owned by userA on-disk/in-memory, but owned by userB after idmap translation 3) owner_or_capable() mysteriously fails as the correct idmap wasn't supplied

In the case of mincore/madvise MADV_PAGEOUT, this is usually benign, because file_permission(file, MAY_WRITE) will probably succeed, as it uses the proper idmap internally, but it does not need to be the case on e.g a 0444 file where even the owner itself doesn't have permissions to write to it.

Since this is clearly not trivial to get right, introduce a file_owner_or_capable() that can carry the correct semantics, and switch the various users in mm to it.

The issue was found by manual code inspection & an off-list discussion with Jan Kara.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-64294?

It affects 1 product.

Products include Linux kernel.

How do I fix CVE-2026-64294?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Is CVE-2026-64294 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-64294 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-93641, BELL-CVE-2026-64294, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-64294, GHSA-rgg7-9234-2h22, ROOT-OS-UBUNTU-2204-CVE-2026-64294, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-64294.