CVE-2026-43389

/// Technical description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: memfd_luo: always dirty all folios

A dirty folio is one which has been written to. A clean folio is its

opposite. Since a clean folio has no user data, it can be freed under

memory pressure.

memfd preservation with LUO saves the flag at preserve(). This is

problematic. The folio might get dirtied later. Saving it at freeze()

also doesn't work, since the dirty bit from PTE is normally synced at

unmap and there might still be mappings of the file at freeze().

To see why this is a problem, say a folio is clean at preserve, but gets

dirtied later. The serialized state of the folio will mark it as clean.

After retrieve, the next kernel will see the folio as clean and might try

to reclaim it under memory pressure. This will result in losing user

data.

Mark all folios of the file as dirty, and always set the

MEMFD_LUO_FOLIO_DIRTY flag. This comes with the side effect of making all

clean folios un-reclaimable

/// Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories, patches, and mitigation guidance. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

/// References