CVE-2026-46063

x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
May 27, 2026
Updated
Jun 14, 2026
Reserved
May 13, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

x86/shstk: Prevent deadlock during shstk sigreturn

During sigreturn the shadow stack signal frame is popped. The kernel does this by reading the shadow stack using normal read accesses. When it can't assume the memory is shadow stack, it takes extra steps to makes sure it is reading actual shadow stack memory and not other normal readable memory. It does this by holding the mmap read lock while doing the access and checking the flags of the VMA.

Unfortunately that is not safe. If the read of the shadow stack sigframe hits a page fault, the fault handler will try to recursively grab another mmap read lock. This normally works ok, but if a writer on another CPU is also waiting, the second read lock could fail and cause a deadlock.

Fix this by not holding mmap lock during the read access to userspace.

Instead use mmap_lock_speculate_...() to watch for changes between dropping mmap lock and the userspace access. Retry if anything grabbed an mmap write lock in between and could have changed the VMA.

These mmap_lock_speculate_...() helpers use mm::mm_lock_seq, which is only available when PER_VMA_LOCK is configured. So make X86_USER_SHADOW_STACK depend on it. On x86, PER_VMA_LOCK is a default configuration for SMP kernels. So drop support for the other configs under the assumption that the !SMP shadow stack user base does not exist.

Currently there is a check that skips the lookup work when the SSP can be assumed to be on a shadow stack. While reorganizing the function, remove the optimization to make the tricky code flows more common, such that issues like this cannot escape detection for so long.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 7fad2a432cd35bbf104d2d9d426e74902f22aa95 to before e2c2b044458cbf22da05264fa707308e8d4f86f9Affected
  • 7fad2a432cd35bbf104d2d9d426e74902f22aa95 to before d042d69b417515959e49021fef008c9b04a99bd5Affected
  • 7fad2a432cd35bbf104d2d9d426e74902f22aa95 to before 4f3374c990fb2adec06d20fd6d780927811c9aa0Affected
  • 7fad2a432cd35bbf104d2d9d426e74902f22aa95 to before 3d29db827502067626062f5c74dd502d14ab15bcAffected
  • 7fad2a432cd35bbf104d2d9d426e74902f22aa95 to before 9874b2917b9fbc30956fee209d3c4aa47201c64eAffected
LinuxLinux
  • 6.6Affected
  • before 6.6Not affected
  • 6.6.140 through 6.6.*Not affected
  • 6.12.88 through 6.12.*Not affected
  • 6.18.27 through 6.18.*Not affected
  • 7.0.4 through 7.0.*Not affected
  • 7.1 and laterNot affected

References

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