CVE-2026-98985 namespace: check the mounts before reading their parents in pivot_root()
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-98985?
CVE-2026-98985 is a vulnerability in Linux, published on 23 Oct 2026.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
namespace: check the mounts before reading their parents in pivot_root()
path_pivot_root() reads the parents of new_root and of the caller's root and checks whether they are shared before it checks that either mount is in the caller's mount namespace. Only namespace_sem is held. That's fine for a mount that is in the caller's mount namespace.
But new_root can be a file descriptor to a mount that has been unmounted and that only the file descriptor keeps alive. If that mount stayed attached to its parent when it was unmounted nothing pins the parent for it. The final mntput() of the parent unhooks the children under mount_lock alone and frees the parent afterwards:
pivot_root() close(fd), last ref on the parent ------------ --------------------------------- ex_parent = new_mnt->mnt_parent mntput_no_expire_slowpath() __umount_mnt(new_mnt) cleanup_mnt() call_rcu() IS_MNT_SHARED(ex_parent)
BUG: KASAN: slab-use-after-free in path_pivot_root+0xf1a/0x1840 Read of size 4 at addr ffff8881047382f8 by task pivot_widen/157 path_pivot_root+0xf1a/0x1840 __x64_sys_pivot_root+0x165/0x190
The same goes for the caller's root via chroot(). Both outcomes of the check end in EINVAL so nothing but the read itself goes wrong. It's the same thing commit bb4609405752 ("statmount: read the parent of an unmounted mount under mount_lock") fixed for statmount().
Check that both mounts are in the caller's namespace before their parents are read. Every path returns EINVAL either way.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-98985?
How do I fix CVE-2026-98985?
Upgrade to a fixed version.
Is CVE-2026-98985 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-98985 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-110822, BELL-CVE-2026-98985, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-98985, GHSA-gfp5-4w3q-vwjx, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-98985.