CVE-2026-53281
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: iommu/vt-d: Avoid NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption Commit 60f030f7418d ("iommu/vt-d: Avoid use of NULL after WARN_ON_ONCE") fixed a NULL pointer dereference in an unlikely situation partly. If dev_pasid is not found in the dev_pasids list, it remains NULL. However, the teardown operations are executed unconditionally, this lead to a NULL pointer dereference or refcount corruption. If the domain was never attached to this IOMMU, info will be NULL, which would cause an immediate dereference when checking --info->refcnt. Even if info is not NULL, decrementing the refcount without having removed a valid PASID might unbalance the count. This could lead to premature dropping of the refcount to 0, potentially causing a use-after-free for the remaining active devices sharing the domain. Fix it by returning early if dev_pasid is NULL, before executing the teardown operations. Issue found by AI review and suggested by Kevin Tian. https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260421031347.1408890-1-zhenzhong.duan%40intel.com
No public exploitation has been reported so far. A fixed version is available (see the table below).
Recommended action: Update to the fixed version listed for your distribution using the native package manager.
Severity metrics
CVSS 3.1 : 8.8 HIGH
Vector: AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected & fixed versions by distribution
Versions are the native distribution strings (backport-aware): RHEL/Debian/SUSE backport fixes, so compare with the distro version comparator (dpkg / rpm / vercmp), not the upstream version.
| Distribution | Package | Affected | Fixed version | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SUSE:Linux Micro 6.2 | kernel-default-base | - | 6.12.0-160000.36.1.160000.2.17 | fixed |
| openSUSE:Leap 16.0 | kernel-default | - | 6.12.0-160000.36.1 | fixed |
| openSUSE:Leap 16.0 | kernel-default-base | - | 6.12.0-160000.36.1.160000.2.17 | fixed |