CVE-2026-74607 KVM: SVM: Serialize accesses to the owner and mirror list with separate lock
A race condition in KVM SVM allows list corruption and potential memory safety violations, enabling privilege escalation or code execution.
- 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-2026-74607?
CVE-2026-74607 is a high-severity vulnerability in Linux, published on 22 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:
KVM: SVM: Serialize accesses to the owner and mirror list with separate lock
Interaction between KVM_CAP_VM_MOVE_ENC_CONTEXT_FROM and KVM_CAP_VM_COPY_ENC_CONTEXT_FROM can cause two separate issues:
- in sev_migrate_from(), when the destination KVM is a mirror, the mirror entry is moved from the source's list to the owner's mirror_vms list, without holding the owner's lock unlike other writers of the owner's mirror list (sev_vm_copy_enc_context_from(), sev_vm_destroy()). A concurrent COPY or destroy can race with sev_migrate_from() and corrupt the list.
- In sev_vm_destroy(), the *owner* is still active and could receive concurrently a KVM_CAP_VM_MOVE_ENC_CONTEXT_FROM that causes sev->enc_context_owner to change. In this case the incorrect VM receives kvm_put_kvm().
The second issue needs particular care because the owner could disappear altogether (even though the race window is impossibly small) between reading it and locking it. There is thus no way to perform the checks under the owner lock without putting struct kvm under SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU (which would allow kvm_get_kvm_safe() under RCU critical section).
It is much simpler to just use a global lock, since the critical sections are so small and the new lock is always a leaf lock.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-74607?
How do I fix CVE-2026-74607?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2026-74607 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-74607 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-97085, BELL-CVE-2026-74607, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-74607, GHSA-v5cv-jrwx-xxrg, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-74607.