CVE-2026-90246

apparmor: fix integer overflow in verify_tags() bounds check

State
Published
Severity
7.1 High
Published
Sep 17, 2026
Updated
Oct 19, 2026
Reserved
Sep 11, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

apparmor: fix integer overflow in verify_tags() bounds check

verify_tags() validates the tagset table unpacked from a policy blob. For each set it reads a count and checks that advancing the index by that count stays inside sets.table[]:

u32 cnt = tags->sets.table[i];

if (i+cnt >= tags->sets.size) {

i, cnt and sets.size are all u32, so i+cnt is evaluated modulo 2^32. sets.table[] is filled by unpack_tagsets() with aa_unpack_u32(), so every entry is a raw unbounded 32-bit word taken from the policy blob, and verify_tags() is the function that is supposed to validate it. A count close to U32_MAX makes the sum wrap to a small value, the guard passes, and the inner loop then walks sets.table[++i] past the end of the kcalloc(size, sizeof(u32)) allocation.

Note that sets.size is bounded by 65535, because unpack_tagsets() reads it with aa_unpack_array() as a u16, so the wrap cannot be reached by growing the table; it is reached purely through the attacker-supplied count.

With sets.size = 2 and sets.table = { 0, 0xffffffff }:

i = 0: cnt = 0, guard 0 + 0 >= 2 is false, inner loop does not run i = 1: cnt = 0xffffffff, guard (1 + 0xffffffff) mod 2^32 == 0 >= 2 is false, so the guard is bypassed and the inner loop reads sets.table[2] -- one element past a two element allocation

The walk continues until an out-of-bounds value happens to be >= hdrs.size or the access faults, so a crafted policy yields an out-of-bounds read on the policy load path (aa_replace_profiles -> aa_unpack -> unpack_policydb -> unpack_tags -> verify_tags). unpack_tags() runs before the perms and DFA tables are unpacked, so no other table needs to be well formed to reach it.

Policy load is gated by aa_may_manage_policy(), which checks CAP_MAC_ADMIN relative to the subject's own user namespace rather than the init user namespace, so with the default unprivileged_userns_apparmor_policy=1 the path is reachable from an unprivileged task in a matched-level nested namespace, not only by a globally privileged one.

Perform the addition in u64 so that it cannot wrap, restoring the intended i + cnt < sets.size guarantee.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.17.1 HighCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:HLinux

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 3d28e2397af7a89ac3de33c686ed404cda59b5d5 to before ef79a405f83993f0fda5efde371d98433f7d7a47Affected
  • 3d28e2397af7a89ac3de33c686ed404cda59b5d5 to before 465946d3c560c0137e6a180ba054dddc4d049f5aAffected
LinuxLinux
  • 7.0Affected
  • before 7.0Not affected
  • 7.2.6 through 7.2.*Not affected
  • 7.3 and laterNot affected

References

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