CVE-2026-80756 selinux: do not cancel a policy conversion that never started
A local attacker with high privileges can cause a kernel crash via NULL pointer dereference during failed SELinux policy loads.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-80756?
CVE-2026-80756 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 3 Sep 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:
selinux: do not cancel a policy conversion that never started
sel_write_load() calls selinux_policy_cancel() when sel_make_policy_nodes() fails, and that helper dereferences the outgoing policy to cancel its sidtab conversion. On the first policy load there is no outgoing policy: security_load_policy() returns early for that case, before it converts anything, and state->policy is still NULL. A first load that fails while building the selinuxfs tree therefore takes a NULL dereference in selinux_policy_cancel(), reached from a write(2) to /sys/fs/selinux/load.
Skip the cancel when there is no old policy, mirroring the check security_load_policy() already makes before it converts.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-80756?
How do I fix CVE-2026-80756?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2026-80756 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-80756 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-99074, BELL-CVE-2026-80756, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-80756, GHSA-crch-pp65-6j6f, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-80756.