CVE-2026-99120

KVM: x86/mmu: Cope with the SS bit being set in #NPF exit codes

State
Published
Severity
Not scored
Published
Oct 28, 2026
Updated
Oct 28, 2026
Reserved
Sep 25, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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

KVM: x86/mmu: Cope with the SS bit being set in #NPF exit codes

When running Hyper-V from Windows 11, KVM is seeing the SS bit set in nested page fault error codes produced for shadowed NPT. The AMD manual is unclear about when SS is set, including whether it can be set when SupervisorShadowStackEn (bit 6) is not set in the MISC_CTL field of the VMCB.

Nevertheless, the unexpected SS bit causes out of bounds accesses in permission_fault(), seen as either WARNs or UBSAN reports:

kernel: UBSAN: array-index-out-of-bounds in arch/x86/kvm/mmu.h:225:27 kernel: index 34 is out of range for type 'u16 [16]'

(in this case, the page fault error code is 34*2=0x44, i.e. SS|U; the report shows SS|U|W happening as well). Fix the handling of unknown error codes by dropping SS and (with a WARN) any bits not among those that permission_fault() expects to receive.

At the same time, given the uncertainty about when hardware sets SS, follow the processor's behavior when constructing the fault's error code, and preserve the SS bit as passed to FNAME(walk_addr_generic). While the behavior is surprising, there's a possibility that Hyper-V expects it (Hyper-V does not even enable CET unless it finds MBEC/GMET!), so retain the information when reflecting the fault to L1 instead of unconditionally discarding it.

Bisection shows that this started happening with commit 687ee95c1b6d ("KVM: nSVM: enable GMET for guests"), even though SHSTK was available to guests since Linux 6.18. However, this is not because bit 1 of MISC_CTL (GMET) somehow enables reporting the SS bit; rather, it's simply that Hyper-V never uses CET unless GMET is also present. The WARN is reproducible even with gmet=0, with some hacking of kvm-unit-tests's cet.c testcase to ensure that the first access to the shadow stack triggers a page fault.

Scores

The record has no CVSS score.

Weaknesses

The record names no weakness.

Affected Products

ProductVersions
LinuxLinux
  • 8db428fd5229ba509d515af10d7f33d7d4a54bfe to before 0caeefed99b37f03251a00eb1fdb403a1cf2cb68Affected
  • 8db428fd5229ba509d515af10d7f33d7d4a54bfe to before d6e08ec2fff45e0ec69f11010851650d7c6282b9Affected
  • 8db428fd5229ba509d515af10d7f33d7d4a54bfe to before e90ab3669181c6469e3647ef2b30ae408275f496Affected
LinuxLinux
  • 6.18Affected
  • before 6.18Not affected
  • 6.18.59 through 6.18.*Not affected
  • 7.2.13 through 7.2.*Not affected
  • 7.3 and laterNot affected

References

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