CVE-2026-68229 media: cedrus: skip invalid H.264 reference list entries
A local attacker can trigger out-of-bounds reads in the Cedrus H.264 driver by providing malformed reference list entries, potentially causing crashes or information disclosure.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-68229?
CVE-2026-68229 is a high-severity memory corruption vulnerability in Linux, published on 10 Aug 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:
media: cedrus: skip invalid H.264 reference list entries
Cedrus consumes H.264 ref_pic_list0/ref_pic_list1 entries from the stateless slice control and later uses their indices to look up decode->dpb[] in _cedrus_write_ref_list().
Rejecting such controls in cedrus_try_ctrl() would break existing userspace, since stateless H.264 reference lists may legitimately carry out-of-range indices for missing references. Instead, guard the actual DPB lookup in Cedrus and skip entries whose indices do not fit the fixed V4L2_H264_NUM_DPB_ENTRIES array.
This keeps the fix local to the driver use site and avoids out-of-bounds reads from malformed or unsupported reference list entries.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-68229?
How do I fix CVE-2026-68229?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade to the fixed version. Memory-safe languages, compiler hardening and fuzzing prevent most new cases. More about Memory corruption.
Is CVE-2026-68229 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-68229 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as BELL-CVE-2026-68229, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-68229, GHSA-59f3-f666-rhr8, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-68229.